


Blood, Coffee, & Motor Oil

by underwater_owl



Series: two creams, one sugar [1]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Canon-Typical Violence, Cunnilingus, F/M, Intimate Partner Violence, Motorcycle Sex, Police Procedural, Slow Build, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, as will story rating, building sexual tension, initial animosity, no max that is not food, probably eventually a lot of kinky sex, use of tags will evolve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-06-04
Packaged: 2018-04-01 15:41:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 41,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4025509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underwater_owl/pseuds/underwater_owl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coffee shop AU.  Except more complicated.  A small town setting, Furiosa is the local mechanic, too much a black sheep in town to be having the easiest time of it.  Max is working the local coffee shop, for something to do and a soft place to land while he recovers from raging PTSD incurred during his police work, and Citadel, Australia, is about as small and sleepy a place as it's possible to get, right?  The Wives are the residents of a rather discretely run home for abused women that Furiosa supers for when she isn't in her shop.  The lesbian separatist feminist motorcycle gang is literally just that.  </p><p>This is a love story, hinged around a missing person, a suspected homicide, a broken carburetor, and a mutual disdain for pretentious coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New Management

**Author's Note:**

> Based off this kink meme prompt; http://madmaxkink.dreamwidth.org/450.html?thread=4802#cmt4802
> 
> Again, please expect more adult content in future chapters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALL RIGHT. Welcome to this story! Before you begin, I need to address a few major things.
> 
> I am fully Canadian. As such, I don't live in Australia. As such, there are some comically bad mistakes in this fic that I have been working on for some time. Ideally I would have snipped them out before this went live, but there just isn't the equivalent service to brit-picking (aus-picking?) available online. Most of the gaffes are now smoothed, edited, and tweaked down with reader support. The big one, however, is Starbucks.
> 
> When you google 'is there Starbucks in Australia' which I did, if you don't read closely, which I didn't, it looks like the answer is 'yes.' It turns out, though, that this is only in big cities, that it doesn't have the market saturation there that it does here. Mea culpa, 100%. I'm leaving it though, because the Starbucks because there are ongoing jokes about it being clearly about to go out of business- and then predictably it goes out of business in the first few chapters- if you like, think of this as a test-pilot of the franchise that went thoroughly up in smoke. Pretend, if you like, that it was a silly Canadian who gave it a shot and had it go broke in record time.
> 
> Any new Australians finding this, let me know what I've missed. All other infrastructure is a good long drive away.

_prologue_  
The Open Road Cafe has been Furiosa’s go-to coffee shop for the last four years, ever since she moved to Australia. Though Starbucks has swept to this far-flung corner of the earth as well, the Open Road is an independent holdout seemingly ready to stand the test of time. Near enough to the highway for convenience, the place still attracts the blue collar set, truckers mostly with a dollar and change, looking for a Styrofoam cup of joe, no milk, no sugar, and certainly no funny machiatto-latte-brulee-mocha-venti-grande business. Furiosa likes the place because the owners know her, and keep a pot of drip coffee going in the mornings for her, without judging her terrible American ways.

Which is why, when Furiosa arrives in the shop at six am the next morning to stumble upon the sight of a milk steamer being installed against the back wall, she looks around for the barista with immediate concern and suspicion. True to her worries, she doesn’t recognize the man leaning up against the till.

“Under new management?” She asks, aware that this is perhaps a gross overreaction, given the fact that she’s dealing with just one new piece of equipment, and one new face. It comes out probably a little more hostile than she might otherwise have intended, if it weren’t six in the morning, if she’d had her coffee yet.

“Mm,” says the barista, which seems to be a ‘yes,’ and Furiosa takes a closer look at him. Ten hands or so, maybe 180, well muscled, sandy brown hair and a black t-shirt. He looks like the sort who should be off getting into trouble more than standing behind the bar of a coffee shop. With the counter between them she can’t tell if he’s wearing the uniform apron or not. The best thing Furiosa can say about him is that he’s currently filling up one of those little Styrofoam cups of coffee, without needing to be asked, and holding it out to her without a word.

She drops her money on the counter, and holds up a hand to forestall him when he opens the till and starts to go through the motions of making change. Without bothering to wait and see if he looks thankful about the tip, she turns on her heel and is on her way out the door, coffee in hand.

 

PART 1  
\---

It’s an unsettling start to an unsettling day. The little town of Citadel is small enough that Furiosa’s is the only mechanics shop in town, and as a rule that helps her. It means that by now, year four of being the proprietor of the business, the locals are finally returning. This is the kind of township where you’re ‘the new one’ for the first fifteen, twenty years your family spends here, and only now are most people quitting their habit of driving two towns over to a garage that’s a little more ‘reliable, dear, no offence.’ 

She knows the place. It’s run by a nice man in his sixties who was born on one of the local farmsteads, and has several things that make him a safer bet in the eyes of the locals, including, but not limited to, local pedigree, two hands, and a penis.

Splendid had once slyly suggested that she should _buy_ a penis and display it somewhere in the shop, to set the locals at easy, but Furiosa thinks that might have done more harm than good. (The pang at the thought of dear Splendid is immediate, but passes quickly enough, as she catches her breath.)

Anyways, after about year three, her reputation among the trucking community for fair dealing and fast work had won one town convert, and with that one came another, and this last year Furiosa has spent about as much time on the local machinery as she has the big rigs pulled in off the long and desolate stretch of nearby highway. Business is up, the pay is finally something approaching good, and by the time she’s in at work and shrugging off her short leather jacket, her mood is much improved.

Furiosa likes getting into the shop good and early. She gets a start on the work day before the sun is too high in the sky. By midsummer, the morning cool will only last a few minutes, and the afternoon sun will be scorchingly hot, but today she has an hour or two while the sky is still a watery, robins’ egg sort of blue. She opens up the hood of old Mr Gunderson’s pick up truck, and loses herself in the morning’s work, in getting the poor old machine to get a bit more go.

The morning passes by quickly like that. Furiosa enjoys these kinds of jobs- they don’t pay, Capable would gently remind her, hardly anything compared to the amount of hours she sinks in to them. Still, she considers it leisure time. It’s balm to the endless dent removal and broken headlights. She loses herself in the work, and by the time the phone rings, a few hours later, she’s covered in motor oil and sweat, and so lost in the job that she doesn’t realize she’s getting a call till something like the third ring.

She’s just stripping off her gloves when machine beats her to it. In the style of everything else in the shop, a thing slightly out of time, the answering machine speaks out loud to the room, announcing the store hours in Splendid’s soft voice, and that can’t come to the phone right now but to leave a message after the beep.

“Hi, Fury, it’s me,” chimes Toast, with the kind of affection and ease that make her wince- if her tenants were just slightly more intimidated by her, her life would be a lot easier, “I know you’re probably out in the yard, listening in. Ms Brown wants me to remind you to get out of the sun and to eat lunch at some point. I wanted to remind you that you owe me a cup of coffee and you’ve been putting it off for weeks. So, we’re meeting at noon, for your lunch break, since I know full bloody well that you don’t have anything on then, and you can’t make any excuses. If that’s a problem you’d better pick up the phone now, but otherwise see you at the Open Road for twelve okay thanks bye!”

Aware, perhaps, that Furiosa was lunging for the phone to make her excuses, Toast’s voice picks up speed on the last sentence, biting the words out quickly before disconnecting the call in a hurry, just as Furiosa makes it to the line.

She doesn’t swear. She does, however, close her eyes in defeat, and rest her forehead against the counter, letting a breath out through her nose and running through a quick plea for serenity.

The girls don’t bother her as much as she’d like to pretend they do. The problem is, they all know it.

While she’s bent over like that, the shop door chimes, and Furiosa straightens up, planting her palms flat on the counter and leaning into it, assuredly, summoning the closest thing she has to a customer-service smile and reaching for a rag to wipe down her clean hand, and the fingers of her prosthetic. She politely ignores the double-take, the lingering stare that the young man gives her, pleased at least that he doesn’t seem to know which part of her should surprise him most.

\--

Furiosa isn’t thinking about the latte machine when she trudges back down the road to the coffee shop. What’s preoccupying her now is the sting of sweat in her eyes, and the suspicion that she may have motor oil on her face from leaning up against the counter before. The kid who’d come in had just taken a card and scampered, so she’s pretty sure she’s lost that one to the armless-penisless phenomenon from before, despite her best (dreadfully poor) customer service smile. She’s only just getting her attention back to the meeting at hand, to Toast and her long hinted at ‘need to talk’ that this coffee is fulfilling. It isn’t about making rent; the cost is deliberately low in Furiosa’s building, and anyways, Toast has been semi-stably employed for the few months she’s lived in the city. Not so reliably employed that Furiosa is going to let her pay for the coffee, of course, which brings her to the thought that she doesn’t know whether she grabbed her wallet on the way out? She’s checking the pockets of her jeans for cash, front and back, when she finds herself practically at the counter and looking up...

At no one at all. Furiosa goes onto her toes, to see over the display of coffee tins, the pastry fridge, and one of the carafes to see if someone might be standing down at the other end of the bar, but no luck there. She turns, and searches the rest of the shop in a slow sweep, when she stumbles upon the sight of the barista from this morning. 

The man is standing in the front window, an incongruously small tin watering can in one of his big hands, apparently tending to the shop window boxes. He is in an apron, she can see now. Not only that, he has a plastic sticker on his chest. Where an employee ID pin might normally rest, someone has stuck a ‘HELLO my name is’ sticker. Furiosa places an instant bet with herself that an employer has instructed him to wear it, but hadn’t gone any more specific with the instructions, because the barista hasn’t actually filled it in.

He’s also staring at her, and has been for the last several seconds, apparently, while she’s been standing at his cash register, and now blatantly looking him over.

Long, long years of life have left Furiosa largely immune to feelings of mortification, so she just steps backwards and leans against his counter, resting her hands on the lip of it, like she has all the time in the world. Whether he falls for it or not, the corner of his mouth quirks up in what might be sort of a smile, and the only thing that saves her from having to come to terms with the fact that she is physically attracted to this person who is potentially a machiatto-involved idiot is the chime above the door going off as Toast slips in.

“You’ve got motor oil on your face.” Toast announces, loudly, as she bounds in for a hug, gamely and kindly ignoring what the dust and mess Furiosa is covered in is going to do to her white sundress. Still, it’s the kind of hug that’s mostly chest and shoulder, to spare her the worst of it. 

“You’re late.” Furiosa answers back, opening her eyes in time to see _hello-my-name-is_ moving past them, to the counter and then behind it. By the time she straightens up and turns to face the cash, he’s set the watering can down and is washing his hands in the employee sink, broad back turned to them. Toast is standing over the pastry display, looking in at the rows of items, almost certainly all bulk purchased and freshly defrosted, but appetizingly sugary nonetheless.

“One coffee,” same order as this morning, “and whatever she’s getting, thanks.”

“You can’t have coffee.” Toast interjects, without looking up from the pastries. The barista’s hand freezes on the carafe. “It’s obscene. It’s a million degrees out there, get something iced, would you?”

He looks from Toast to her, as though awaiting a final verdict, and Furiosa scrubs her hand over her face, before remembering she’s just smearing grease around, and that now it’s on her palm, again. He’s still staring at her, so she just shakes her head, and sets a note down on the counter. She’s paying, she gets to decide, and she wants plain and simple hot coffee.

The only amendment she makes, when she sees him reaching for the Styrofoam again, is to add;

“For here.”

The place has no air conditioning, but it has some shade, and a little rotating fan standing near the back wall, and they can at least stay out of the noonday sun. She can at least use their bathroom while Toast keeps pretending to resist the sweets section. 

Furiosa steps into the familiar back corner, flicks on the light, and turns the water on with just her fingertips so as not to continue to spread the mess anywhere. She soaps her hand off quickly, and dries it on the hand towel, before stopping to take a paper towel to the worst of the mess on her face, as well. The bathroom mirror needs a good cleaning, she thinks, which is at least _one_ thing about the place that hasn’t changed under the new management. After a moment of looking past the crud on the glass, and the oil on her face, she takes a good, hard long look at herself.

She can do this. Snapping out of it, Furiosa steps out of the bathroom, squaring herself off to face the combined obstacles that are the barista and her tenant.

Toast has settled down in one of the chairs close to the fan, and the barista is busy behind the counter- but catches her eye and nods her towards the cash register. She’d put down a twenty, and while it had been reasonable to just leave the change this morning, there’s considerably more of it now. She pockets the notes, and tosses the coins into the little tin can marked _tips,_ with felt pen on masking tape. The barista nods at her, and sets two cups down on the counter in front of her. Her own ceramic mug, and Toast’s tall, cool glass of iced tea.

Furiosa looks down at the glasses, and then very gingerly sets her palms back on the counter. It’s rare it takes someone this long to notice, but now she gets to see the expression on his face when he takes all of her in. His eyebrows lift ever so slightly, the universal look of surprise that almost everyone gets. It’s partially that she has a prosthetic arm at all, she knows, but also that it’s an unusual one. Furiosa has manufactured herself rudimentary fingers, an elbow joint and a wrist with nearly full mobility. It’s cruder than some of the really advanced limbs that are coming out these days, but better than many people are able to afford. She’s able, for example, to pocket her change and then to take the glassware gently in hand, and deliberately, carefully, walk over to where Toast is sitting, waiting for her.

“What’s this about, Toast?”

Her gruffness is practiced, but softened a bit by the way she lowers her voice. The barista is cleaning up after making their drinks, but is too near within hearing range for her comfort. He seems to be actively trying not to listen, but casts a glance or two in their direction. Luckily, within a few seconds, he ducks into the back, and she can turn her attention back to the issue at hand.

“I have another potential tenant for you.” Toast says, and the bottom drops right out of Furiosa’s stomach. She knows it doesn’t show in her face, which is something, but it reflects in Toast’s eyes in ways she doesn’t particularly care to think about.

“She’s just the kind of girl the organization likes to place. She’s- her boyfriend.” Toast says, voice sliding lower, delicately, glancing at the kitchen now. “She’s from Darwin. Up North.”

“Thanks, Toast,” Furiosa answers, drily, because one day they’ll stop pretend-assuming she knows absolutely nothing about the geography of her adopted home.

“Right. And her boyfriend- well, right now, she’s in an emergency housing unit and she can stay there for a week. But she’s really nature oriented, she’d like to move out somewhere she could get work on one of the farms. And the further away she is from him, Fury, the better.”

Furiosa lets out a breath. The apartment building is more of a house, actually, with segments converted into small housing units, and a communal living space on the ground floor. Furiosa serves as landlord, superintendant, and man-of-all-work, and in return has a small cabin to herself towards the back of the property, an old converted servant’s quarters. The premise is run as a not-for-profit by one of the womyn’s groups associated with her mother’s old gang, the aim of which is to provide reasonably priced, discreet, sisterhood oriented housing for women leaving abusive situations. They’re far more grassroots than they are, strictly speaking, ‘licensed,’ but since the women own the property themselves, and the money the girls contribute really just goes to utilities and upkeep, they skate by largely under the radar. Furiosa likes to pretend to insist on rent being paid in a timely manner, because of firm belief that the women who live with her need to get in the habit of getting back on their own two feet, but in reality no one has ever been evicted from the home, no matter how long the cheques went unpaid.

There is, technically, a vacancy. As much as she wants to protest, and as much as she can see that Toast looks uncomfortable asking, it sounds like there is also a woman in need. 

She’s still thinking of Splendid when the barista comes out of the back again. He’s carrying a rag and spray bottle, and headed for the bathroom. He leaves the door open, in case the front doorbell chimes, she bets, except she can also tell that he’s in earshot again.

Toast is watching her with concern in her expression, clearly still waiting for her overdue answer. In the end, it’s easier to know what to do than it is to say it out loud. The memory of one shouldn’t be enough to compromise the safety of another, she reminds herself.

So, Furiosa nods, and winces when she sees just how relieved Toast looks. Grateful, too, enough to promise, in a high, excited voice;

“I’ll pack things up, if you like. I can buy boxes on the way home from work.”

“No, no,” Furiosa says, with a sigh, “I’ve got a budget built in for things like this. If you want, you can help, but I have to go over the room for damage anyways. Don’t worry about it.”

Toast grins, and changes the topic. It’s a good thing she does, because the barista goes back to his counter, lounging behind it now with the local paper, making Furiosa feel ever so mildly antsy. The policy, as informal as everything else about the house, is not to discuss it with anyone, _anyone_ who doesn’t live there. Many of the women who come through have to deal with stalking and criminal harassment, even the odd unethical private investigator. Continuing any discussion of the new girl’s living arrangement in front of this man would be strictly taboo.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that Furiosa’s mental habit of referring to her tenants as ‘the girls’ would make her mother roll over in her grave. They’re all over the age of eighteen, currently, if just barely- it just also happens that the oldest of them is currently twenty five, and to Furiosa’s thirty nine years that makes them ‘the girls,’ as much as the sisterhood would insist on their being ‘the women.’ On this score, she can’t help but feel vaguely guilty, and that the second wavers from her childhood are really the ones that had it right.

The rest of her lunch hour goes quickly. The coffee helps, and so does the fact that the barista (henceforth _the_ barista) is joined by a second one, a kid much younger than him and one with apparently a little more authority in the situation. Yeah, he’s the same kid who was in her garage earlier, she’s pretty sure, but the way he’s talking to this guy now lightens her mood. Her bet about the tag was right, apparently- she doesn’t catch the words over the noise of the fan and Toast’s conversation, but there’s no mistaking the timbre of frustration in the kid’s tone or the fact that he’s clearly reaching for the felt pen sitting next to the tip jar.

Picking up her coffee cup and holding the rim against her mouth, to tamp down a smile, Furiosa leans forward ever so slightly to peek around the watering can and the new kid- a wiry little thing with bright blue eyes and a slightly manic energy in his step. Unperturbed, his subordinate employee is still leaning against the counter, with his hands now tucked into the pockets of his apron, and a freshly inked nametag on his chest.

On the way out, Toast is the one to say it first, which is good, because Furiosa isn’t sure she’d have been able to resist it.

“Bye, Max.”

 

The next morning, Furiosa stops in for coffee again, and is unsurprised to see Max again. This morning, someone has made him a customer name pin, albeit with a label maker rather than his name actually embossed into the plastic. He’s in a clean tshirt and apron, and reading the new newspaper for the day already. When Furiosa steps up to his counter, he speaks what she realizes are the first real words he’s said to her.

“You might want to consider cutting back.”

His voice is deeper than she would have imagined. The total frankness in his expression is the only indication she has that he’s kidding, except that a man in his circumstances must have a sense of humour in order to survive.

“You give that advice to every customer? That must be good for business.”

Despite his admonishment, she notices with approval that he’s already pouring her a cup, in exchange for the handful of loose change she manages to drag out of her coat pocket. Her wallet is still where-ever-the-hell, and she doesn’t own purses, so this mess is just what was down behind the sofa this morning. It lands on the counter with a fair amount of lint, and one of Capable’s hair elastics. Max looks from it, up to her, and rather wisely doesn’t ask, separating out the change he needs from the till with careful, calloused fingertips. Furiosa tips an appropriate amount back into her pocket, and drops the rest into the tip jar, coins rattling too-loud in the empty canister in a way that makes her feel a little awkward, like she’s trying to buy more of something from him.

“Boxes.” He says, as he snaps the plastic lid onto her cup for her. He brings it to the counter, and sets the cup down in front of her.

“Sorry?”

“Your friend yesterday said you needed boxes. We’ve got them ‘round back, big cardboard ones. Cup delivery, lid delivery, beans, napkins...”

He trails off at the look on her face, and she can only guess what it must be by the way his expression shutters. He hadn’t exactly been open before, but now he looks like he expects her to throw a punch. Honestly, if there weren’t a counter between them she might be tempted to.

Furiosa takes her coffee, turns on her heel, and gets the hell out.

\---

The thing about Splendid wasn’t that she was pregnant. Furiosa had known many women who were. Violence tended to escalate during a pregnancy, in many kinds of abusive relationships, so rudimentary prenatal care was a familiar part of her job.

It wasn’t how long she’d stayed, either, because there were girls who had been there longer- Capable and Cheedo had both arrived before Splendid, and stayed since. Toast had arrived not long after.

It wasn’t even the death, though that was always terrible. Other women had come her way and gone back again before. Abusive relationships are hard to leave in every sense of the word, and some returns were a part of the work. Furiosa tried not to let her heart break for them, let them know they’d be welcome back if they ever needed, and hoped for the best while expecting the worst. Among those women, there had been fatalities.

The thing about Splendid that is ripping Furiosa apart is _not knowing._ Splendid had disappeared from home without warning four months back. Heavily pregnant, fleeing an abusive husband (a religious leader of something culty and a real fucking shithead, from the sounds of things) it hadn’t made sense for Splendid to flee without a word. She’d left her clothes, her things, everything she’d gathered in anticipation of the birth of the child- but with her wallet and her car gone, the officers Furiosa had dealt with in the aftermath had been firm that there was nothing they could do. An investigation, they informed her, would remain ongoing, but with no indication that Joe had any information about his estranged wife’s whereabouts, they couldn’t do more than hold him for questioning. 

The whole thing makes her sick to her stomach to think about, to this day. It’s as much of an outright failure of the home as they’ve ever had. The police remain sure that Splendid has just moved on, cut and run, and promise to keep an eye out for her car- but Furiosa is growing more and more privately sure that neither will ever be found. Packing up the boxes feels like a grim confirmation of that defeat.

It takes until late afternoon, a skipped lunch break and a whole morning spent on her back underneath the front end of a Mazda older than Cheedo for her to come to terms with the fact that she may have been a little harsh with Max, given his apparent attempt at helpfulness and his total lack of context for the situation.

She drops her head back a little further, twists the wrench again, then lets out a long breath of frustration and tries to decide if it’s worth bothering to apologize.

Tonight is Wednesday, which is communal cooking night, an event that is not to be missed. So, Furiosa puts her barista problems out of her head, lets herself off work early, and locks the place up behind her. The sun is still high enough in the sky that she doesn’t want to try to walk home, so she grabs her keys and helmet from behind the counter and gets on her bike. The thing scared the hell out of the locals her first year here, before she’d managed to get across that ever motorcycle driver out there wasn’t necessarily part of a gang- leaving well-out the fact that yes, at one point arguably she was, because there’s just too much context there to try to impart to the townsfolk.

It’s only a few minutes ride out down the back roads, though, and she doesn’t end up passing a single car on her way up to the house. Sure, a housewife or two probably peeks out at her from behind the curtains, but there will never not be rumours about what goes on in this place, and the current ones that revolve around some kind of pot dealing suit her just fine.

She parks around back, and heads in to clean up the kitchen, prior to the big cook-out of the evening.

Furiosa’s place is actually drug-free, though her own back apartment have a few brownies tucked in the freezer that may have a little more of a kick to them than is really expected. Alcohol, though, they aren’t as fussy about, and dinner turns out to be Mexican food on the porch, with margharitas by the pitcher, thanks to Capable’s firm guidance. Toast has told her, Furiosa can tell, about the clean up that’s going to be done, so the conversation tonight is a little more warm than usual, a little more tender, as the three current residents express their care for her in the ways they know best, namely food and drink.

“And then he got electrocuted,” Cheedo is saying, which snaps her wandering attention back to the conversation they’re having, “which is like the third hospitalization this picture. Fourth, if you count the extra who went into anaphylactic shock over the sunscreen allergy.”

“What were the other two?” Capable asks, brows drawn together.

“A grip was moving a fan that someone hadn’t put the front casing on, and it was fast and sharp enough that it actually took off his thumb.” Cheedo answers, which makes Toast cringe and put a hand over her eyes. “And that aide I’m in replacing was the one who broke her ankle on the steps up to the trailer.”

Country out here is filming territory, which is good contract work if you can get it, and Cheedo has worked on three pictures now and seems to be finding a knack for it. She’s been one of the slowest to find her feet that Furiosa has known in a long time, but that air of learned helplessness and fragility is finally starting to diminish in earnest. Getting called in to this picture as a replacement had been a huge coup. The actor she’s working with now had remembered her and specifically suggested to check if she might be free, after the accident with her predecessor. The work is a commute and a half, honestly, but the independence is too good for her to pass up.

“As glad as I am you’re getting to do this...” Capable starts to joke, and Furiosa looks out over the dust outside, and the stars that are just coming out. This far out away from the city, even the diffuse lights of the town aren’t enough to diminish the nighttime sky. It’s glorious, in a way that the girls had never seen from the cities they’d come from. Furiosa remembers sights like it, on the long treks on the back of her mother’s bike when she was a girl.

“There’s a new guy at the coffee shop.” Toast says, apropos of nothing except for maybe Furiosa’s total inability to focus. She says it with enough light, loaded intention that it’s clearly the start of a story, not the end of one. “His name is Max, and he’s cute, and Furiosa intimidates him.”

Capable snorts, which probably means something along the lines of ‘doesn’t she everyone?’ which makes Furiosa smile, thin lipped and triumphant, taking another long few sips of her drink.

She doesn’t need to fill them in on what happened this morning, she figures. For now, she plays along.

“It’s been a while since a man like that came into town.”

Cheedo’s mouth drops slightly open, like she’s just heard her own mother admit to having a sex drive. She’s only thirty nine, for Christ’s sake, but these kids sometimes make her feel ninety.

It’s Toast who wins the round though, with a musing;

“Imagine Susan Greer’s face if you go through her grocery store check out line with a pack of cigarettes and a box of condoms.”

Cheedo goes beet red, Capable about goes over backwards with a shout of laughter, and Furiosa climbs to her feet, mouth twitching in an indulgent smile. She leaves them to their laughter, and to the eventual cleanup, strolling her own way back up to her little house, coasting on the mild buzz and trying not to think about the fact that it’s Wednesday and she has work in the morning.

\---  
The next day, with an unduly blistering headache, and equally undue roiling sense of humiliation, given she’d only had a single drink, momentarily unwilling to face any of it, Furiosa breaks a promise to herself and to her ancestors both. 

On her way in to work she resorts to Starbucks.


	2. 1973 Ford Falcon

The hangover the next morning really is unpleasant. Since about the age of thirty, something in Furiosa’s metabolism has apparently changed such that anything more than a half glass of wine leaves her with a blistering headache that lasts past noon. In her shop, so briefly considers just going straight-edge, making it a lifestyle or philosophical thing, but she’d miss drinks nights with the girls something dreadful, even if she does have to pay for it through the nose.

Because she’s in a bad mood anyways she forces herself to drink the starbucks coffee, then digs out one of the packages of instant that lives in one of her desk drawers and dissolves it into boiling water from one of the hot shop-taps, reusing the same paper cup. It’s a mild improvement, but only because the bar has been set very low.

She gets as much work done as she can. Parts, it surprises a shocking number of motorists to know, are slow to make their way out to Citadel when they need to be special-ordered. She keeps a good number of basics on-hand, but with the diversity of what she’s dealing with out here, more often than not Furiosa’s job comes down to waiting to hurry up. Right now, there are two cars parked in back, whose fates rely on the arrival of shipments sometime in the next week.

That means that this afternoon is free to finish up the final tweaks on the mazda, which is soon purring away happily under her careful hand. When she’s done the full checkup, she locks the shop door behind her, tacks up the ‘back in 5 mins’ sign on the door, hops behind the wheel and pulls on out.

The best thing about working in small towns rather than big city shops is getting to do things like this. Furiosa had worked for years at a Goodyear, and a Canadian Tire in the town before that, back overseas, and she knows she’ll never give up her corner out here, even though it keeps her in a kind of voluntary poverty. Asceticism, she’d argue, is a perfectly fine philosophical stance, and Splendid would have pointed out that that was all well and good, but it’d be nice if she didn’t have to eat quite so many lentils, and just because Furiosa shaves her head does not a monk make.

Ms Brown still has the loveliest garden in the town, but doesn’t hear the phone ring so very well anymore and just generally appreciates it when Furiosa can be the one to drive the car back to her. She doesn’t live more than a ten minute walk away, honestly, so even if they miss each other, it’s an easy jaunt back to the shop. 

Today is one of the days where she catches the old woman out front, buried up to her waist in a hedge of peonies, bees bumbling lazily about her like she’s just part of the scenery. Honestly, she practically is. The woman has lived in this town since the day she was born- barring, of course, then ten or so year stretch where she tamped down the shutters on her house, let the oldest daughter take care of the garden for a while, and went out to ride with the womyn and their bikes. She’s the reason that safe house was established in the town of Citadel, of all places, and the closest thing to real family Furiosa has in town. The driving-the-car-home policy is one Furiosa adopts with most of her customers, but she’s always especially glad to be able to do it for Ms Brown.

She hops out of the mazda and wades gamely into the garden, trying not to step on anything living with her utility boots and bending down obediently to let her adoptive ‘auntie’ give her a kiss on the cheek, and a pat on the arm with a gardening glove that adds a smear of dirt to her collection of grit and grime from the day. In the grand scheme of things it makes almost no difference.

“I’m keeping you,” Ms Brown decides, in the tone that demands obedience, “go sit on the porch. I’m going to be just a minute.”

Furiosa knows how to be around the matriarchs in her life, so does as she’s told.

\---

Payment from Ms Brown, which always comes, regardless of how often Furiosa tries to just bill her for the parts and not the labour, is three twenty dollar notess, a nectarine pie, and a bouquet of fresh cut flowers ‘for the womyn.’ She can always hear the ‘y’ when Ms Brown says it, it’s distinctly there in the note of pride. Ms Brown drives her to the shop, and then sets off in the newly running mazda towards the house, to make a delivery so Furiosa won’t have to contend with both the pie and the peonies in the sunny, dusty late-afternoon.

Technically, yes, while she’s been sipping iced tea with Ms Brown, she’s been neglecting the shop today, and the posted hours of business something dreadful, but in a town like this those kinds of pressures aren’t what they would be in a real city. The same way she can get away, here, without owning a cellphone- basically no one has reception at any point, anyways- she can let a five minutes stretch to encompass an entire afternoon.

Inside the shop is cooler than outside, but not by nearly enough. Furiosa switches the AC on, and heads over to the counter. With the book keeping assiduity of many a small-business owner, she scrawls a few details down in a handkept ledger, and then pops the till, tucking two of the notes into the back of it and pocketing the third. She finds her wallet, incidentally, hiding behind a stack of receipts, and leaves it there, making a note to remember it for later, to get it into the pocket of her jacket- she shouldn’t technically be driving without a license, even somewhere as sleepy and unpoliced as Citadel.

The next order of business is to deal with the blinking light telling her there are messages. The first one she’d already overheard yesterday, Toast informing her of the specifics of their coffee date. She deletes it before it can finish playing.

The second message is more interesting. A young man with a high voice she’s never heard before comes on the line, and asks;

“Hi. I’m calling to ask some questions about ordering car parts, for a friend of mine and- okay, bye!”

No contact information or callback number, and nothing approaching a serious enough inquiry that Furiosa thinks she needs to respond to it. She deletes that message as well. There’s nothing else, which isn’t a surprise. For two hours out of the shop, even one call is ‘busy.’

The rest of the day crawls by in a summery haze. The weekly meals are just that, weekly, so tonight she eats in her own place, before crawling into the shower, and then pouring herself into bed. One of the girls has brought a Tupperware with a slice of Ms Brown’s nectarine pie over, and she lies, naked and still damp, on top of her sheets while she eats it, enjoying the night breeze as it drifts through her windows.

The last time Ms Brown had been over, there had been a lecture about nectarines. Furiosa had recalled that she hadn’t had any, during her childhood, that she didn’t think they’d been invented yet, and at Cheedo’s expression of curiosity, the elderly woman had asked the girls;

“Who knows what a mule is?”

“A kind of pony.” Capable had recalled, licking brown sugar off her fingertips, then using the wet tips of them to pick up bits of flaky pastry on her empty plate.

“A hybrid.” Toast corrected, which made Cheedo look up in curiosity- she was doing a movie right now with hybrids in it. “A mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey. They’re naturally sterile, but useful enough that they’ve been produced that way for years.”

“Stubborn as a mule,” Furiosa murmured, an agreement, a bit of floating free associating, something the womyn used to accuse her of, once upon a time.

“Indeed.” Agreed Ms Brown, with a decided twinkle to her eyes. After so long spent out in the sun and the wind and dust, her face is like deeply lined leather. Furiosa is sure she’s somewhere between the age of seventy and a hundred and ten, but honestly couldn’t get more specific than that. There, at the kitchen table, half lit by candles and presiding over a small coven of serious faced girls in white cotton, she looked like a warlock, like the leader of her own coven. “Well, a lot of people _think_ a nectarine is a mule-fruit, a peach and plum. Actually, it’s the result of some very selective cultivation, the work of a handful of recessive genes. It’s to a peach what the sunset is to an apple.”

“But then why are peaches peaches and nectarines nectarines, when sunsets are apples?” Toast, the interrogative, wants to know.

“It’s like how pink is a colour but lilac is a shade,” Capable answers, who is more at peace with illogic than Toast has ever been.

The sunset apple is a variety she grows in her gardens, alongside her carefully tended nectarines, and a staple of their household, come mid-fall. There are actually a few bags of the frozen applesauce they’d made last year still in Furiosa’s deep freeze right now.

There in bed, she makes a mental note to take one out, because they should be eaten before the new crop turns up in a few months. She sets her Tupperware down on the bedside table, and rolls out of bed to go brush her teeth.

\---

Starbucks offends her tastebuds and her politics, both, in no specific order. Furiosa isn’t ready to deal with Max, precisely, but without the pressure of a hangover spurring her on can’t even drink half of the cup of coffee the next morning. It goes down the sink in her shop, and the cup joins its’ brother in the waste paper bin. By two pm she has a raging caffeine headache, from the withdrawal.

She’s woman enough to know she has to deal with this like an adult, before it spirals into something ridiculous. By the time she’s come to this conclusion it’s three pm, and even though _she_ isn’t one to obey the laws governing employee hours in small businesses, it’s a pretty good bet that Max will be off shift. Anyways, she isn’t going to alter her routine to affect an apology, that’s ridiculous. So, the morning after that, she makes it down there for six.

Summer is rolling in so fast that they’ve actually gained a measurable amount of sunlight, just in the short days since Max arrived. Even this close to dawn, she’s in a sweater today rather than her jacket.

The part of her that had been secretly hoping for a last minute reprieve is disappointed to see that, yet again, Max is behind the counter. He’s sitting, this time, on the edge of the back shelf, centre of his back leaning against the latte machine, and Furiosa is reasonably sure that kid manager might have something to say about that.

In the two days since she’s been gone they’ve put the screen door on the shop for the summer. The glass door proper is propped open inside, and the whole setup makes the place look more like what it is, the converted front porch of one of the old town houses. As she steps in and lets the door close behind her, it whisks back on its’ spring and thwacks shut tightly in the frame, with a crack that seems tremendously loud in the early morning silence.

Max flinches, eyes flying open, and for a second he looks nothing more than a million miles away and in a blind panic.

Furiosa has seen that look before. It’s quick enough that she isn’t going to draw any massive conclusions from it, but she files it away mentally under ‘shell-shock,’ because yeah, in her line of work, flinching is a pretty familiar thing.

Reasonably enough, Max looks displeased that she’s now seen that look on him, or maybe just displeased to see her to begin with. The look on his face is too passive to be a glare, but she’s not fool enough to think that that means something.

The funny thing is, it doesn’t even bother her. She knows he has a bad attitude, it’s part of the reason she _wants_ to come back. If she’d had to deal with the girl with pink rubber bands on her braces beaming at her over dark stained wood with low level ambient jazz playing one more day, she might have had to do something drastic.

“Morning.” Furiosa says, stepping up to the counter, and accepting his sound in return- grunt really- as as good as she deserves right now. She leans in, rests her stomach against the wood of the countertop, and watches him pour her cup. The pot he has now only fills it up about a quarter of the way, and he calls over his shoulder at her.

“’get a new pot on. Won’t be five minutes.”

Something she notices is that he abandons whole words entirely, his accent swallowing up the ‘I’ll’ that presumably lives in that sentence. That this is maybe the second sentence he’s ever spoken to her.

“That’s fine.” Taking that with equanimity is the least she can do, she supposes, and anyways, it means she has him here for a second. It takes her a breath or two to launch into it, without further preamble. “Listen, about those boxes.”

Whether or not Max would actually have looked up at that, Furiosa isn’t sure. Right now, though, he certainly isn’t. In fact, he interrupts her by pressing the button on the coffee grinder, which sends up a racket that pierces her temple like a knife, this early, and before she’s had her cup of coffee. Maybe he’s right. Maybe she does need to consider cutting back.

The machine turns off, and Furiosa takes a few level breaths, before reminding herself that he has no obligation to make this easy for her. 

“My friend and I, who were in here the other day. We were.”

Her voice dies in her throat, and she tries to clear it, reaching for the bare swallow that’s sitting in the cup on the counter. It’s an old pot, pretty stale, lukewarm, but it does the job, and looking at the residue in the bottom of it gives her something to focus on. When she speaks again she’s proud of how it comes out, smooth, normal, level.

“We were discussing boxing up someone’s effects.”

It’s the kind of language you have to use with strangers. If she has to say ‘someone died’ out loud her voice won’t _stay_ level for long, she knows that, and anyways it brings up all kinds of questions, considering no one out there seems willing to admit, on an institutional level, that Splendid is actually gone. She digs the edge of one fingernail into the foam, drawing it down and creating a satisfying line, then turns it into an x.

“You took me by surprise.”

There. As apologies go, she knows that it’s technically a lousy one. The words ‘I’m’ and ‘sorry’ appear nowhere in it, least of all back to back. Still, the texture of the silence has changed now, and when she looks back up at Max she discovers him looking back at her with the kind of empathy in his expression that doesn’t set her teeth on edge. Something a lot more ‘been there’ than ‘poor thing.’ 

He comes to her, and for a second she isn’t sure- but what he wants is the cup she’s holding, now drained, for the top-up.

Max finishes making the coffee in silence. After living with the girls, and there lively chatter, it’s a little slice of home to find herself with someone who ‘rides so quiet,’ as her mother would put it. She relaxes, breathes in the smell of the coffee, and stands with him in the silence, until he finally sets the cup down on the counter.

She tugs the twenty from yesterday out of her pocket, but stops. His hand is up between them, fingers tilted towards her in a little arresting gesture. His head twitches, just once, in a gesture that she reads as a negative.

“On the house. For the wait.”

She meets his eyes, reads there, written clearly, _no hard feelings,_ and finds herself in the unusual position of feeling an unbidden smile stretch across her face.

Leaving it at that, Furiosa takes the cup, takes a grateful, too-hot sip, and returns his nod, heading for the door.

\---

She comes back home that night to find Cheedo in the living room, putting together boxes with packing tape, and Capable carrying them up the stairs. There’s no sign of Toast, she’s presumably up in Splendid’s room doing the actual packing.

For a second or two Furiosa wants to be mad, but the sight of Ms Brown in the hall knocks the wind out of her sails. The truth is, she’d promised Toast three days ago that the job would be done ‘tomorrow,’ and then hadn’t done a thing about it. She feels a squirm of guilt at the thought- she should be strong enough to deal with this- but it’s soothed away by the brush of a worn hand over her cheek, the knowing look in Ms Brown’s eyes on her way past Furiosa, up the stairs.

It’s all right to love people, and it’s all right to feel frustrated and upset when they’re gone. It’s all right, she knows her mother would say, not to be the one who has to do each and every thing.

Furiosa goes into the living room to fall onto the couch next to Cheedo, who will need the most reassurance. She expects the quick and furtive look that the girl gives her, and is pleased to see the relief on her expression. Of course she isn’t mad.

“You’re going to like the new tenant,” Furiosa offers, soothingly, as though that’s what Cheedo is worried about, as though the problem isn’t her, “I mean, I hope you are. Toast says she’s going to call herself ‘the Dag,’ and that she wants to work with her hands.”

Cheedo smiles, and shifts away, to go bring the newest set of packable cardboard boxes upstairs. Capable passes her, on the way down, and Furiosa was going to be fine, honestly she was, except that Capable has the infant car seat under one arm and tears on her face, and before Furiosa knows it she’s out in the night air, down the front steps, and heading for her bike.

\---

When she’s driving, it feels like flying. It feels like every single problem is left behind her in a plume of dust. The taste and press of the helmet around her face is familiar, rather than stifling, and the nauseous feeling in the pit of her stomach smoothes itself away, gives way to the pounding of her heart, the rush of adrenaline in her head. She hears herself taking deep, gasping breaths, like someone has punched her in the stomach, and keeps going at full throttle until she isn’t any more.

\---  
The next morning is Saturday. _The Open Road_ is closed until 10 am, and she’s in the shop well before then. She’s a bit of a mess, to be perfectly honest, even though she’d slept in till eight- she hadn’t gotten down for the night until two, maybe even three am. At 8:30 am, she’s sitting in the office chair behind the desk, leaning back, hands curled around a cracked, stained mug full of another cupful of the lukewarm, instant shit.

Furiosa is leaning back in the chair, listening to the metal in the frame creak alarmingly. The fact that she’s ostensibly a mechanic and must have some bloody WD40 around somewhere occurs to her just as the bell above the front door chime.

Looking up, over the edge of her cup, she’s somehow utterly unsurprised to see Max the barista standing in her doorway.


	3. motorcycles and switchblades

The nice thing about the situation, Furiosa thinks, is that he’s caught her in a good moment. Leaning back in her chair, with one booted foot up on the edge of the desk, cup held up under her nose, she may look dragged out and exhausted, but she at least looks calm and low-strung about it, at ease in her own element. Given how twitchy and irritable she’s been with him so far, it’s an interesting change of pace.

It’s also something of a power shift, she realizes. He’s stepping into _her_ shop now. Instead of being there to serve her, something of the reverse is true. A mechanic gets a little more leeway with customers than a barista does, but he’s no longer under any obligation to hold his tongue with her.

She sets the coffee cup down, and delicately lowers her foot, chair tipping up to rights again.

“Hey, Max.”

The flicker of a grimace isn’t entirely surprising. She wouldn’t like having a nametag on her chest either. The realization makes her get up, and fish one of her cards out of the holder on the desk, proffering it out to him.

To her surprise, Max actually digs into his own pocket, and pulls it out already, holding up the twin of the one she has between her fingers. _Furiosa Imperatore, Registered Mechanic. Owner, Citadel Garage,_ plus the shop hours, the address, and the phone number, in black print on white stock.

“Good.” She decides, setting the card she’s holding back in the stack of them, trying to hang on to the moment of cool she’d felt when he’d first walked in. It’s easier than she might have expected, honestly. The answer is to just not try to rush to fill his silences.

That means waiting a good minute while he makes a slow and searching examination of the room, checking over her licensing (correctly displayed) and a few of the old photos, the history of the shop before she bought the last owner out, four years back.

Finally, finally, he turns back around to her, and comes out with it.

“If I needed to special order a few car parts out here. A coworker said that was something you might be able to help with?”

Right, the phone call that she’d never returned. The kid, who’d come in and taken her card. Furiosa nods, slowly. It’s not a common request, exactly, but it’s an understandable one. They’re rural enough that the postal service out here is variable. House to house package delivery isn’t available, everyone picks up packages at the central parcel office, one town over, and even then, many online retailers won’t take a gamble shipping something as expensive as rare parts out to an address like this. With her business address and license, though, she can get into some of the more professionally-oriented suppliers websites.

“Sure, if I can track it down. What do you need ordered?”

He reaches into his back pocket again, and Furiosa is struck by how different he looks without the apron on. He pulls out a computer printout, unfolds it, and steps forward to smooth it out on the table in front of her, turning it around so she can see.

It’s for a Ford six cylinder carburetor, one of the early 1970s models. Furiosa whistles, despite herself.

“You don’t fuck around.”

Max smiles, just a tiny little uptick at the corner of his mouth. Asks;

“Flat fee or percentage?”

It’s such a hopelessly city question. Furiosa finds herself reminded that he’s clearly new in town, doesn’t know yet that trust, given and offered, is its’ own kind of currency out here, that the thing he’s going to have to do to survive is learn to expect a fair shake.

“If you want me to install it for you, I can price out the labour when I see what kind of shape she’s in. But since I’m betting it’s just a pick up, you owe me-” tracing her finger to the place where it says on the page, “one hundred and seventeen dollars, sixty nine cents, plus tax, shipping and handling.”

That smile of his doesn’t widen, exactly, but it does suddenly reach the corners of his eyes, shows up there clear as day in his crows feet. 

She likes the country, and she isn’t such a snob that she minds working primarily on trucks, tractors and jalopies, but a 1970s Ford is such a change of pace that she can’t resist. Plus, she wants to see what he’s done with it.

So, she draws the paper over to her side of the table, pretending to keep reading it, to ask, nonchalantly.

“When’d you get into town?”

Because she isn’t looking at him, she doesn’t know if he’s surprised or not. She suspects not. Interrogation by the locals is part and parcel of living in a place like Citadel. If he isn’t used to it yet, he will be soon- and it seems like he is, because he clearly anticipates the questions that come next.

“A week ago. Saw the job posting in the paper. Renting the old Miller place for now.”

Mr and Mrs Miller, also Ford owners, panel truck, later model. The Millers had moved up to a home a year or so back, northwards, closer to their adult, city kids, and the place has been sitting closed down and empty ever since. It’s across the street from Ms Brown’s, actually, which isn’t that much of a coincidence- there are basically only three real streets in the downtown part of Citadel township.

“Welcome to the neighbourhood.” She intones, not entirely facetiously, but certainly halfway there. 

“You’ll give me a call when you know the cost?”

Another city habit he’s going to have to let go of. Furiosa gives him a wry look, and corrects;

“I’ll let you know what it turns out to be when I see you.”

Anyone who comes to the country for solitude is kidding themselves. Anonymity and privacy in a place like this are totally laughable. She’s sure that with three phonecalls she could know Max’s home phone, his family’s history, his shoe size. He heads out, and leaves her thinking to herself that he is in for a rude awakening.

\---

The Dag is there on the doorstep when Furiosa gets home that night. She’s luminescently pale, ethereally blond, and sharp as a knife. Furiosa likes her right away, and moves past her into the house, giving the door a kick to keep it open behind her, a silent invitation for her to come on in.

She has one violently blacked eye, fading now, and a cast on one arm, and a pissed off look on her face that just dares you to mistake her for fragile. She uses the good hand to drag her case up the stairs after Furiosa, and nods, just once, when she’s let into her little apartment, shutting the door behind her almost in her new landlord’s face.

Furiosa grins to herself all the way down the stairs. She always gets along best with the very angry ones.

They don’t get to have a proper conversation until the next morning. Sunday is the day of the week Furiosa tries to stay home, in deference to the girls’ insisting she not work herself into an early grave, as well as the locals’ gentle fretting over whether or not she’s really going to get any customers Sunday _morning,_ implying quietly that there’s somewhere that everyone really ought to be around then.

Even though Furiosa has absolutely no intention of attending church, it’s a pretty set in its ways little community, and lying around in bed while the shop stays empty is a fine compromise, as far as Furiosa sees it. They don’t ask her to come to worship, she does her part to preserve the tranquility.

She wonders whether the new management at the Open Road Cafe have worked that little negotiation out for themselves, and decides she’ll ask on Monday, if she remembers.

With the town so quiet, she uses the chance to take Dag out and around in her own beaten up, Sunday driving car. She’d take the bike, but roaring around town on that thing at this hour would be infinitely worse than having the shop open.

The tour is a short one. Citadel contains, from one end to the other;

Debbie’s Provisions- the corner store where you can buy milk, but you’d better check the expiration date on it first, the morning paper, and a box of moth eaten cookies, some gum and candy bars.

The Open Road Cafe- which Toast, who’s joining them, sitting excitedly in the back seat, points out contains ‘Max, who we’re pretty enthusiastically keeping an eye on for Furiosa these days,’ Christ help her.

The obligatory local pub, which is actually currently not a pub, in that it has been gutted by a devastating and probably insurance related fire. It'll open back up again soon, though no one is sure precisely when.

The school, a long slung, two story affair that has four classrooms and handles students from up to five townships over. Schoolbuses consist of minivans with inexpertly painted signs on the sides.

‘The dome,’ a rinklike structure of concrete that is technically a parking lot, but that has mostly been commandeered by kids with skateboards and the odd rollerblader. It’s the kind of town centre of counter culture, and the home stomping ground of what passes the one local dealer, Aaron ‘the Slit’ Smith, who’s still dealing with the worst of that pubescent acne and sometimes has a bud or two in a bag in his back pocket.

After that comes the Starbucks, which sticks out like a sore thumb. Across the street is the garage where the volunteer fire fighters park the truck. There’s no one on staff in the fire department, just a bunch of locals who’ve had a few hours of training once a year and who’ll man the vehicle if anything does ever burn down. Fires are a lot more common than you might think, in the sprawling farm properties around Citadel. It’s a pretty heavy area for insurance fraud. People know they can count on the fire department being so slow to respond, and a practically nonexistent reporting rate, to burn old farmsteads to the ground in order to qualify for a healthy insurance claim. Typically by the time the city volunteer crew is notified something is wrong, all there is to do is head out and pour some water on the smoldering ashes.

“We’re really thinking someone at the Starbucks franchising is going to figure out at some point that they’ve made a terrible mistake and shut the place down.” Toast, admits, in Dag’s arch silence. “So get your frappucino fix while you still can, hey?”

Furiosa turns them on to the next street over, thinking to herself that this may be what is wrong with the world.

This street is all houses. She pulls them up to Ms Brown’s, and Toast and Dag pile out to head up the walk, while Furiosa sits in the car and gets a breath. She watches them, for a minute, watches Dag, who has lived her whole life in a city desert of nothing but concrete and the odd window box, reach out and helplessly touch the leaves of the plants as she walks up the way, with the tips of the fingers that poke out of her cast.

Movement in her rear view mirror catches her attention. Max is out on the Miller’s side porch, in one of the plastic lawn chairs, sitting in the shade. He’s watching them.

Furiosa opens the driver side door and swings her legs out, pulls herself to her feet and runs her hand through her hair. When she turns around to face Ms Brown’s house, she catches a glimpse of the Miller porch again from the corner of her eye, and notices that Max has slipped back inside.

Dag’s story comes out in Ms Brown’s back garden. She looks out at the horizon with hard eyes, and talks about a father, who taught her what to expect from men with long years of hard rules and the back of a hand. She talks about a series of boyfriends, each a little worse than the last, and then the most recent one. There may be some trouble there, from the snatches Furiosa hears through the kitchen window, where she’s making lunch. Auntie Brown will tell her later if they need to worry. Dag is going to be staying awhile, is going to try her hand at this gardening thing, is going to do some good by taking the strain off poor Ms Brown’s back and hips, which don’t like to bend over and crouch quite as much as they used to. (These problems of hers are intermittent, and most likely to flare up in the company of a girl who needs to feel strong, to feel the joy of her own kindness towards another, to feel sisterhood, to feel her own worth.)

Furiosa is unspeakably relieved that the outpouring is happening on Ms Brown’s strong shoulders this time, rather than her own. Right now, she doesn’t honestly know how much more of the violence she can carry.

It’s another hot one today, and only getting hotter. Auntie Brown doesn’t have an air conditioning unit, so Furiosa just sags forward into the heat, resting her forehead on the kitchen counter for a moment, before reaching for the tap and turning it on cold. She splashes water on her face, the back of her neck, her throat, and lets out a sigh as her skin comes up in gooseflesh. It helps, for the moment, and takes some of the sting of the sweat out of her eyes.

It’s going to be a long summer.

\--

After that, things settle into their own kind of routine for another couple of weeks. Furiosa works in the shops, and sees Max on Tuesday to Friday mornings. Through no real effort, just the coincidence of working and living in a town this size, she learns that he works the opening shift in his shop on Tuesdays through Saturdays, six am to one pm on the weekdays and ten am to six pm on the weekend. She figures this out in part because she has to make an appointment to drop the carburetor off at his place, and finding a time that works mutually pretty much comes down to the following Monday. She herself works Monday through Saturday, officially from eight am to five pm, though generally showing up in the shop closer to six thirty or seven, but leaves the shop and locks the door behind her with almost total impunity.

This drives home to her two things; one, that she is a workaholic who probably doesn’t get enough privacy at home, and two, that she is maybe paying a trifle too much attention to Max Rockatansky.

The last name she gets, not through her terrifying powers of observation, but when he pays her back by credit card for the carburetor. 

The funniest thing she learns is that Max disdains the fancy coffee machines almost as much as Furiosa herself does. Toast and Dag join her again in the coffee shop for another lunch hour break, and Dag asks for a caramel latte. A brief, flat expression flits across his face that makes Furiosa have to turn her head to look out the window quickly, in case it sets her off laughing.

“Coffee for me.” Furiosa adds, before Toast can go into her hot drinks speech, even though it’s still sweltering, and the breeze of the little fan still grinding away on the counter just can’t keep up. Toast rolls her eyes heavenward, and looks like she’s about to interject, when Max surprises all of them by speaking up.

“You-” a thumb pointed at Dag, “can’t be helped.”

She draws in a single, irate breath, but he’s already pushing on, pointing that challenging thumb at Furiosa, looking her dead in the eyes. She draws in one good, long, slow breath, and watches him right back.

“You, though, I think I can do you one better.”

Max’s accent is different from the girls'. Maybe when she’s lived in Australia longer she’ll be able to place the region he’s from, but right now, all she can say about it right now is that it’s slower, lower, a little more drawling.

“Give it a shot.” She challenges him, with a prickle of defiance, turning to go claim a seat at their table directly in the path of the fan, leaving the other two to deal with the fact that their barista is apparently going rogue. He softens Dag back up by making her something sweet, coffee-ish, but also sugary and cold, and pours Toast her normal iced tea without needing to be asked. Then, though, he comes around the counter and puts a glass down in front of Furiosa.

It’s beaded with moisture, black as hell, and has only one icecube floating in it.

As a rule, the iced coffee you get in Citadel is ‘diner style,’ namely, a pot that was once upon a time fresh, set in a fridge overnight and left to die a slow death. It’s simultaneously bitter and muddy, and Furiosa will order it in a lifethreatening emergency but not under any other circumstances.

The drink Max hands her tastes nothing like that. She’s prepared to be disappointed, _wishes_ she could be disappointed, but just, can’t bring herself to be. It’s probably properly brewed, she decides, iced coffee of the kind that comes out hot onto a carafe full of ice, and drained quickly into the cup, and besides they’re using the right beans for it. On the hot, hot day she actually feels a tangible shiver of bliss go down her spine.

“That’s.” She says, weakly, holding the chilled glass up against her forehead for a second before glancing up at him, as nonchalantly as she can. “That’s a lot of chickory.”

It isn’t the most gracious concession speech she’s ever made, not by a long shot, but he’s grinning at her in a way that is actively disarming. The girls make it infinitely worse, each looking expectantly between them as though the pair somehow can’t _see_ them.

Max notices this a second after she does, and vanishes into the back with a dignified step, mostly ignoring the chorus of giggles.

“Go fuck yourselves.” Furiosa tells them, eyes closed. “Both of you.” 

It only makes the laughter worse.

\--

Without a further word said on the subject, Furiosa starts bringing a metal water bottle into the shop with her in the mornings. Max does what he does, hot coffee onto ice, swirled and drained directly into the bottle itself, so she gets a full cup and change to take with her. The price becomes flexible, whatever she has in her pockets, a five dollar note one day and then on the house the next, as he wings this ‘barista’ thing with an impressive lack of attention to detail that must drive Nux around the bend- that’s the manager kid, the one half his age who’s ostensibly in charge of this strange, taciturn man. 

Furiosa likes watching them together, because Max actually says more to Nux than he ever does to her, but Nux is ten times as uncomfortable with the silent spaces in between, and runs his mouth like a motor as a result. But, he seems like a nice sort, and when Capable starts hanging about the place, Furiosa has a few guesses as to why. 

She comes into his shop for her coffee every morning for two weeks, before they next say a single word to one another. They might very well have kept on that way if it weren’t for Immortan Joe’s terminal cancer.

The thing about Joe is that, in addition to being Splendid’s horrifyingly abusive ex-husband, the man is also the leader of his own small group of radical, xenophobic fundamentalists. Furiosa understands separatist subcultures better than just about anyone, and is sympathetic on the whole, but has no patience for the misogynistic, racist, homophobic bullshit organizations like Joe’s thrive on. 

When photos of the wild-haired leader with an oxygen tank at his side and a breathing tube in his nose appear in the paper, it merits a front page spread. Furiosa would know his beady little eyes just about anywhere.

Max is getting her coffee together, and sets down the paper to do so, and Furiosa takes advantage of it to lean over his counter and snatch the paper up, pulling it closer. _Prosecution for racketeering charges expected to stall,_ it says, _expected to live six months,_ it says.

She stays bent over the counter, reading the whole piece, start to finish, and then over again a second time. When she looks up, Max is standing there, holding her coffee, looking genuinely and openly concerned.

“Sorry,” she says, and pushes the paper back over to him, then takes her coffee and leaves. They may have reached a sort of truce, but conversation still isn’t exactly their thing.

\---

Work is better than the start of her morning, but not by much. It bugs her, that she’d dropped Max’s parts off, but still hasn’t had a chance to see that car. He's pulled it into the Miller's garage, apparently, and hadn't offered a tour when she'd stopped by with his parcel. Furiosa hadn't been surprised, exactly, but it is staying with her.

To make matters worse, today it’s teenage boys on a road trip with an unexpected check engine light, and full of helpful commentary on what it probably is or probably isn’t, like Furiosa doesn’t know how to do her own damn job. The boys jabber, and bounce, and ogle, and don’t take her up on the multiple hints that now is about the time where they’re going to want to be getting the fuck out while she finishes her job. She sends them on their way with a properly tightened gas cap and a quick, private, middle-finger salute, and a bill for the labour.

\---

Between all those things, but mostly the shit with Joe, that afternoon Furiosa needs to get on the bike again. She doesn’t know if the girls have heard the news, and doesn’t stop to ask on her way out the door. She just gets her jacket on, her helmet, and hits the road.

The stress doesn’t ride off quite so easily in the daylight. Maybe it’s having to narrow her eyes against the dying sun, or maybe it’s the fact that there are still cars on the road, but the sensation of flying isn’t quite coming to her tonight. She passes a sedan, gingerly, and then nothing else for a couple of long miles. Then, a curve in the road, that she slows down for but still corners fast enough to make her heart sing. On the other side of the bend she flies past a hitchhiker, walking along the side of the road, thumb out.

If it hadn’t been for needing to slow down marginally to take the corner, she probably wouldn’t have recognized him. As it is, she’s a few hundred feet down the road by the time she slows, stops, and waits for a car to go by before turning the bike back around, coasting slowly down the road towards the figure that is almost certainly- yes, it’s Max.

Max, who is looking at her like she’s about to attack him, who has his hand in his pocket and is holding what old instincts tell her is an unopened switchblade, even though she can’t see it properly through the visor.

She pulls the helmet up and off, and asks the first thing that comes to mind;

“What the fuck are you doing?”

For one thing, pulling a knife on strangers. For another, walking out here with a backpack and nothing else, in the middle of the bloody desert. It’s almost a two hour walk from Citadel to the next nearest town, down the road he’s taking.

She sees the moment he recognizes her, something relieved and dreadful unfurl in his chest, as he processes that he isn’t going to be fighting for his life right now. A stranger, circling on a bike, yeah, now she can see it through his eyes. The knife has slipped away into his pocket, like it never was, and he’s jogging up to meet her at her handlebars. If he’s come this far by foot, he’s been on the road for at least an hour, she reasons.

“Max?”

“Car’s not working.” He reminds her, which is news to her. The parts came a few days back. Maybe he’s having more trouble getting the thing going than he’d initially thought? His voice sounds uncomfortably raw, like he’s been walking out here in the sun without nearly enough water.

His car isn’t working, and there isn’t a proper grocery store in all of Citadel, unless you count Debbie’s, which you shouldn’t. A supply run into the city once every couple of weeks is a must, if you’re going to live out in their town, and Max has no car, and she’s sure no friends yet, not this fast.

She stares him up and down, levelly, as she tries to weigh the risk of him riding in a t-shirt compared to the risk of him staying out here, succumbing to heat stroke. In the end, it’s an easy decision to make. She reaches into the back pannier and pulls out the helmet and glasses she keeps on the bike in case she picks up one of the girls, then rips the extra inside padding out and shoves it back in the case, before holding it out to him, an order as much as an offer.

He wets his lips, nods, and takes it, buckling it on before slipping onto the bike behind her.

“Hold on.” She instructs him, and then his arms, big and broad, around her torso. She feels the brush of his chest up against her back. Furiosa leans forward into the handlebars to disguise a shiver, and kicks the bike into gear.

The countryside flies by just a little slower. It’s impossible not to drive slightly more carefully with an unfamiliar passenger on back, least of all one not wearing proper protective gear. Furiosa gets them into town without incident. When Max reaches out ahead of her and points to the big, local supermarket, she nods and pulls into the parking lot for him. The place is the smallest possible iteration of the kind of box stores that are so ubiquitous back in the city, and serves something like six local townships like Citadel. Tonight it's quiet, and she has her pick of a few of the spots out front. She pulls in, noticing the stares of a few of the locals, a mother hurrying two wide eyed children along. Max seems oblivious, instead focusing on storing the helmet back safely.

Furiosa just keeps hers in hand, and follows him into the store.

Realistically, she should be leaving him behind, should head off to the post office and swing back over to pick him up. (Realistically, she should have asked more questions about the fucking _knife,_ but then, she has one a lot like it, and generally tries not to judge.) She can’t seem to go get back on the bike, though. Following him into the grocery store, she watches as he first pulls his water bottle out of his backpack and takes a long swig.

It makes sense that he has one, and makes sense that he’d be rationing it, on a walk like that, especially if he needed backpack space to get the food back with him. Coming late in the day is a good idea, too. It means less time under the hot sun, and obviously he’d been prepared for the eventuality of trouble on the road. Still, a trip like that was really fucking reckless. Of course, in his position, though, she can’t say she’d have done any different. A cab ride out in this part of the world would be a couple of hundred bucks, easy, and a barista doesn’t have that kind of cash to blow floating around, she’s guessing.

She’s expecting to him to shop like a frat boy, she realizes, and is surprise when he heaps his basket with produce, and sources of protein, economical and compact, value for his food. Plus, a lot of it could be chopped into the instant soba noodles they sell at Debbie’s, she’s reckoning. Furiosa makes a mental note to convince Capable that it’d be a good idea to have her boy Nux over for dinner, and maybe ask Max along too, if he can make it.

It’s a hell of an experience, padding along after him in the grocery store, watching him pause and pick between eggplants, choose the right can of tomatoes. She loses it when he stops to read the nutritional content on various power bar boxes, and has to step back, grinning.

He glances over at her, and arches one eyebrow, though she can tell he knows perfectly well what the look on her face is for.

“Thanks for the lift.”

The words honestly surprise her, as he turns back to reading. Evidently whatever he learns about this package pleases him, because he puts it in his basket. The girls aren’t going to believe this. For once, Max continues on his own;

“It’s a hell of a hike, and I think the rest of the townsfolk think I’m a mass murderer.” It could be a joke, or it could be true. Furiosa winces an agreement, and circles ahead of them to go look at the sugary cereals, mostly to see how terrifying they’ve become since her childhood. “That ever go away?”

“Took three years for me. Might be a bit more for you, might be a bit less. You’re a man, you look relatively normal, and you’re from the right country, so you’ve got an edge there in terms of the social expectations, but on the other hand you’re an enigmatic bastard, so...”

He breezes past her, around the corner, a laugh hidden in the corner of his mouth at the insult, and Furiosa bites back a grin before following at an easy amble, rather than trotting to keep up. She actually has an inch of height on him, she’s realizing, so the long and powerful strides that probably work so well on other people are a bit wasted on her.

She catches up to him half way down the aisle, looking at jams, _jams,_ of all things, and he’s being quiet again, but is still smiling.

Max pays for his groceries, and loads them into his backpack. Furiosa takes some of the heavier cans to load onto the bike itself, then puts her helmet back on and nods for him to climb aboard. The balance isn’t perfect yet, but they aren’t going far. She takes him over to the post office with her, and he hops off, uncomplaining, waiting without asking any questions, and following her into the building when she strides ahead.

She’s at the counter with her parcel delivery slips, when the clerk asks for photo ID and Max catches up to her. The woman scans her picture, then only vaguely bothers with Furiosa’s face, but mostly matches her name to the parcel with a long-fostered inattentiveness to detail. Then, she sets the card down on the counter, where her apparently rather light-fingered barista nabs it, quite blatantly, and peers at her name and photo. Revenge, she supposes, for the business with the name tag.

The card is her drivers’ license, featuring a photo of her, much the same, albeit maybe wearing a little more eyeliner than she’s bothered with in the last three years or so. She looks stony and serious, which is normal for her in general, but a little more acceptable in the context of a license, at least. Her name, date of birth, and address are printed on the card.

Max scans it, scans her, much like the clerk had done, but with more of a twinkle in his eye, and hands the card back. She should find it in herself to be annoyed, but is instead curious when he announces, quietly;

“I’d wondered.”

‘Wondered what,’ is the easy question, that playful, normal people would ask in order to play along. Furiosa, instead, puts the license back into her wallet and raises her eyebrows at him. Because Max is not a normal person, he’s apparently completely unperturbed, and continues.

“Nux bet me an extra shift in the shop that it was a fake name.”

Furiosa’s jaw _drops,_ quite honestly drops, and she snatches the first of her packages from the clerk, who seems a little startled at the turn the interaction has taken, but shuffles into the back. In the mean time, Furiosa begins tearing the box open, stripping the tape back to get at the mechanical parts inside. The packaging is too bulky to come with them on the bike.

“The little shit. It’s real. In fact, it’s been mine since birth, I’ll have you know.”

This person, speaking so archly, it isn’t her, she’s sure of it. She doesn’t _play_ like this with anyone who isn’t one of her mother’s friends, or one of her girls. Max is using that knife now, and yes, it’s definitely a switchblade, to get into the second box through some hard-to-open packaging. They trash the wrapping in the post office garbage, and head out to the bike, loading up her baskets with the auto parts, and a little more of his food, making sure the distribution is better in preparation for the long road home.

He’s on the bike behind her, arms around her waist again, when he gives in. He leans in, so she can hear him, and in doing so presses himself along the whole curve of her spine. It's different, this time, like instead of hanging on he's holding her in a casual, easy embrace, as he asks;

“How did you end up with a name like Furiosa Imperatore, then?”

“Well, Imperatore is Sardinian” she says, head tipped forward as she lifts the helmet up, ready to put it on, but pausing to answer him, “and as for Furiosa, it just so happens that my mother was a part of a radical separatist militant lesbian biker gang.”

With that, she shoves the helmet on, and peels them out of the lot, feeling the engines roar to life and Max Rockatansky chuckle, low and pleased, against her back.


	4. a question of birthdays

Furiosa had conveniently forgotten that Max’s house is right in front of Ms Brown’s. Any hopes of slipping him in quietly are put to bed by the sound the bike makes as she pulls up in front of his yard. She brakes, turns the beast off, and kicks down the stand, before waiting for him to disembark and following after him. 

By now across the street a light has come on in the downstairs window, and Furiosa shakes her head, setting down the helmet for a moment before going to help him re-pack his knapsack, juggling car parts with foodstuff as they load him up, until the things for her shop can be stowed back away safely.

Max zips his bag, and gives her a nod of thanks, then tosses a questioning look over her shoulder at the house. Furiosa just shakes her head, because Ms Brown is too much to explain, but instructs him;

“You come find me before you try that walk again. And you bring your car by the shop, if you can’t get it going in the next while. Life can’t be done out here without something to drive.”

He doesn’t acquiesce, precisely, but seems to take the instruction in stride, and nods again, a gentle sort of thanks, before turned to head back into his house. She notices, watching him retreat, that he walks with some sort of sway to him, like he might be wearing a brace on one leg, under those jeans.

She shivers again, and turns to face her fate, because if she doesn’t go in now then Ms Brown will skin her for dogmeat.

The Dag is there too, it turns out, standing next to auntie with dirt on her hands, dirt on her face, and a smile that’s all too sly. Furiosa lets out a long breath, shuts the door behind her and leans back against the door, permitting herself a tiny, cautious smile in return.

She feels good about how that went.

\---

Furiosa’s first impressions of Nux, collectively, hadn’t been overwhelmingly positive. As she spends more time with him, that changes. 

It’s mostly how he treats Capable, whom he views as clearly some sort of goddess- and not because she’s beautiful, although it certainly doesn't hurt. Furiosa watches Nux fall in love, very nearly in love at first sight, with Capable’s unflagging kindness and mercy. Capable attends church every Sunday, and soon Nux is attending with her- not for the beliefs, he informs Furiosa, shyly, later, just on account of the message- and he seems as much touched by the light of their girl as he does the glow of faith.

Furiosa watches Nux with Capable, and knows that he would sooner cut off his own hands than harm a hair on her head. They’re going to go slowly together, in the physical sense, because Capable is going to need them to in a very real way, but emotionally the pair of them are twined up around each other as can be, and walk about with fingers laced. 

It’s a good thing the town of Citadel is too small for a _real_ shop of any kind, because she gets the feeling that if Nux had the option of heart shaped chocolates or stuffed bears or any other sort of trinket he might panic and get them all at once. Aside from being dotty about her, the boy has the emotional maturity of any other twenty two year old, which is to say he does okay a lot of the time, but sometimes just derails spectacularly. For a week or two after Capable remarks that she likes wildflowers, the house is full of them, until they’re having to put the newest bouquets in things like juice pitchers and drinking glasses. In the end Toast’s hayfever gets so bad that an intervention is staged, and Nux is gently course corrected into a bouquet every few weeks or so. The nice thing about Capable, too, is that she manages to do it without hurting his feelings in the slightest.

From Nux, Furiosa extracts more of the story of the changing of hands of the Open Road. Nux had worked for some guy, a business owner back in Perth, as a night manager of another local and considerably more trendy coffee joint, when the owner of the Road had put the business up for sale. Nux had persuaded his boss to go in to the place as an investor, encouraged by the fact that the previous owner had clearly been of retirement age, and apparently selling them a reasonably successful business model, if the books had been anything to go by. Nux makes payments to said previous investor, but the situation is more along the lines of being a loan, and one that Nux has confidence will be paid off in short.

Modernizing the Road and increasing that profit margin? Well, that had been a bit of a bust. After the unsuccessful attempt with the latte machine, and the suspicious reaction of the locals, Nux had had the wits to backtrack fast on that plan and is continuing to run the place as-is for a little while longer. Things are still on track, though, and he’s optimistic that within the next seven years or so he’ll be the sole owner of the spot, his own little corner of the world. Oh, and Max responded to the add posting, and turned up one morning ready to work. He’s older than Nux originally expected, and a little odd, but he can make a fine cup of coffee and they’re keeping him.

For a boy as young as Nux is, the whole thing strikes Furiosa as both an incredibly grounded dream and a very attainable one. At his age, she’d wanted to be designing space ships, dreaming up lesbian-only missions to Venus in between her various political actions and near arrests. Compared to her, Nux has a hell of a head on his shoulders, and seems to know what makes him happy and what he wants to do with himself.

It doesn’t give her all that much about Max, except for a few things it drives him; that he’d left wherever he was on a moment’s notice, moved here at the drop of a hat, and is definitely not the kind person who normally turns up to barista in a joint like this one. 

Nux also corrects her that in a business of this scale, making the kinds of drinks it does, Max can only charitably be called a barista- that back in the city he, Nux, had been charged daily with pumping out foam fern topped lattes by the score, and operated machinery with the timing and technical finesse that would put a closed course driver to shame. Max, he says, pours the coffee.

That’s the other thing Furiosa likes about Nux. His sense of self-preservation is totally non-existent. He tells her all of this, with Max lounging a few feet away, behind the counter, absorbed in the day’s paper. Max could crack Nux in half, in Furiosa's conservative estimation. A corner of his mouth twitching periodically, like someone who probably should be offended, but really just isn’t. Nux will never, ever be smart enough to try to soften something up for Furiosa, will never sugar coat or worry that maybe he should be pulling his punches. The kid just doesn’t have that bone in him.

She doesn’t know what Capable has told Nux about her story. The rule with the girls is that they’re allowed to disclose whatever they like of their own history, but that the purpose of the house must remain strictly secret to anyone not a biker and not a resident. Friends and family aren’t to learn the address, in the event that they pass that information back on to ex-partners. When they arrive, each of the girls is quietly and cautiously told the horror stories. The worst one to date is the thirty six year old lawyer who told her own mother, to reassure her she was doing all right and living somewhere safe. Her husband had seemed so genuinely apologetic, so totally heartbroken, that the mother had given him the address, because she was a little old fashioned and she didn’t know the whole story, but couples got into rough patches like this all the time, and a reconciliation had seemed so reasonable.

He’d shown up two days later with a gun. Luckily, the only person he’d shot with it was himself.

\---

Immortan Joe- and what kind of asshole name is that to insist to be called by, anyways? Furiosa mentally tries to rechristen him ‘Joe Chrichton,’ which is who he is in actual fact, when he’s not being propped up by his little cult, or by the voyeuristic condemnation of the papers. Joe is released from pretrial detention on compassionate grounds later in the week, and Furiosa lights a cigarette and has a drink in the privacy of her rooms, a thumbful of bourbon which she toasts to Splendid, the sorely missed.

Because she still can’t work out how Splendid was found, there’s no hope of linking the death back to Joe in the first place, and not a prosecutor alive who would tangle with the situation. Her halfway dreams of tracking the mystery down, spurring a real prosecution, seem to be slipping away before her eyes. She isn’t going to go to Joe and bring trouble to the womyn’s doorsteps, and the bastard will be in the ground before too much longer anyways.

Still, thinking of him walking free makes something in her burn.

At least work is busy right now, which keeps her mind off the problem during the day. It’s actually such that she asks Capable, two Saturdays down the line, to come into the shop for the day and lend a hand. Capable isn’t a mechanic, not by a long shot, but Furiosa hasn’t been able to keep on top of the phones, or the cleaning, and Capable is a hard worker and a tidy soul by nature, and knows how to put the shop back to rights while Furiosa bends into the front of a Toyota Corolla- the family that drives it is parked in a roadside motel for as long as she has it here, so she’s trying to sort out whatever it is the fanbelt is doing in a bit of a hurry.

The first thing she becomes aware of is the fact that Capable’s amiable, if somewhat one sided conversation about peach cobbler, has drifted to an unusual halt several moments ago. She straightens up, slowly, grabs a rag to clean her hands, and turns to see Max in the doorway. Capable, the traitorous thing, is standing between them leaning on a broom, looking like the cat that got the canary. 

Max, on the other hand, is looking like a man who has just been caught, unintentionally watching a woman bent over at the waist, only he’s maybe a tiny bit afraid of what that woman in question is capable of doing to him, now that she’s caught him.

Well, good, she can live with that. Furiosa arches her eyebrows at him expectantly, a _yes, and?_

Sheepishly, Max puts a hand through his hair, and admits;

“I’m out and about on the day off you won me.”

Right, the bet with Nux. Furiosa spares a glance at Capable, to let her know that she’s in for it later, for having such questionable taste in men and the continued terminity to be grinning right now. Max continues;

“Thought I’d come see if you wanted a bite of lunch.”

“I can’t,” Furiosa admits, gesturing back at the car, right as Capable interrupts;

“She won’t eat, but you can eat with me. I’ve got sandwiches, come on.” She sets off for the nearby bench. Max hesitates for a moment, glancing at Furiosa, who nods her permission, an agreement that yes, that seems like the best thing to do right now.

The fan belt finishes up pretty quickly, and Furiosa calls the family to let them know they can catch a cab on over, but slides under the front end of a jacked up Nissan with some kind of unspecified rattle. She’s in the process of ruling out the usual culprits, so can stand to listen with one ear as Capable draws Max out into the kind of conversation that Furiosa hasn’t the comfort level or patience to manage.

It isn’t surprising, and it doesn’t make her envious. That’s just Capable, who has a way about her. It’s that she knows how to ask questions that seem important, not like meaningless filler. She looks you dead in the eye, and pulls out a one two punch. First, she tells you why she wants to know, and then asks you her question, and the result makes most people want to pour their heart out. On Max, the results are moderate to low, but she does succeed in getting him talking.

“I’m thinking of throwing a birthday party for Nux in a few weeks, since he doesn’t know very many people in town. You know him better than me, what’s he like?”

Furiosa smiles, as she steadies herself with the mechanical hand, and tightens with the wrench with the other arm. The creeper tries to skid a little underneath her.

“Nux is a kid. He’s growing up fast, on account of having to, but he’ll like anything that makes a fuss, even if he’ll never ask for it. Just make him a cake, stick some candles in it, write his name on it, he’ll never forget it.”

She can hear from where she is that he’s shrugged, delivered the answer like he has no idea, like it’s a casual impression, but from what she knows of Nux, Max is probably right.

“And Furiosa is turning forty in a few more months. We’re definitely going to do something good for that. You’ll come, right Max?”

Furiosa sets her jaw, but finds herself smiling, more than irritated, as Max allows;

“If I’m invited.”

It’s an invitation to chime in, and if Furiosa were any other woman she might use the opportunity to provide a reassurance, or an overture, but she just stays down there. She likes the way Capable is making him squirm. For one thing, she reasons, if Nux is going to keep it up, and Max’s going to try to keep hanging around, then he had better start getting used to the girls in a hurry.

“And when’s your birthday? How old are you going to be?”

That is when something interesting happens. The texture of the pause in the conversation changes, and Max asks;

“Why?”

Short, and in a hurry, curt, like she hasn’t heard him speak to anyone, even her, back when she got off to such a rough start with him right in the beginning. Capable is a little too poised to stammer, but the silence stretches out. Something about it tickles an instinct, and she shuts her eyes for two seconds, until the penny drops. The silence ends, and Furiosa is the one to break it.

“Cop.”

She declares, loudly enough that she knows she can be heard from under the car. It puts paid to her little charade of being unable to hear them from down here, but who cares, this is too interesting to miss out on.

“Mm?” Max asks, sharply, in a way that tells her she’s absolutely right, as Capable interjects;

“Because he’s vain about his age?”

Furiosa drags herself out from under the car, the creeper rolling her smoothly into the middle of the conversation. She gets an elbow under herself, and half sits up, pointing at Max with her wrench, and explaining to Capable.

“If you have access to the right databases and a person’s name, first and last, and date of birth, you can track down pretty much anything about them. People don’t know that. The people who do know that, the people who are that cagey about giving out their birthdays, that’s a cop thing.”

A triumphant twirl of her wrench, as she sits the rest of the way up, feet planting on the concrete, elbows resting on her knees. She has to squint against the afternoon light to see Max’s face, but yeah, that’s a fairly impressive look of resigned irritation he’s wearing.

It wasn’t just the birthday thing, though that had been icing on the cake. It was the way he let silences pull people into speaking, and the way he watched things, watched _everything,_ and maybe even a little bit in how he flinched when the screen door banged that day. Furiosa grins at him, then lies back down, and kicks herself under the car once more.

“Furiosa!” Capable says, getting to her feet and coming closer. “You’re terrible. What if he’d been under cover?”

“Oh, please, in Citadel?” She puts her tool back to the stubborn problem, twisting again. “What’s he going to do, launch an elaborate sting to bust Aaron Smith for two lousy joints?”

But Capable is tugging at her ankles, and Furiosa acquiesces, letting herself roll back out. Capable is standing over her, frowning, and Max is still sitting back at the bench. Furiosa lets a sigh out through her nose, and sits up, instructing Capable, somewhat more solemnly now;

“But neither of us is going to tell anyone. Head into the office for a minute?”

She does, and this leaves Furiosa and Max, looking at each other across the open space. He looks cautious. Scalded, even, now that she’s getting to her feet and seeing him properly. He’s still on the bench, frozen, in fact, likely in the same posture he was in the moment she outed him.

Furiosa crosses gingerly over to him, until she’s standing above him. She waits there, with the warm sun on her shoulders, until the moment she sees him catch up and look up at her, back with her for the moment. When he nods, she sinks down onto the bench next to him, and leans her elbows back against the table behind her, presenting an open posture face turning up to the sun. She waits until she feels him, tentatively, begin to unwind, to lean back to do the same, and hears his breathing change as he shoulders push back, his lungs fill properly up.

She kicks her combat boot against his, companionably, and lets the silence rest, as the car (it had seemed so urgent just a few minutes before) languishes, forgotten, up on the jacks.

\---

Birthday or no birthday, Officer Max Rockatansky is a quick google search. She runs it, absently, suspicious by nature, later that night, and only pauses to feel guilty when her results turn up nothing but a little mention in a newspaper for a bit of feelgood nothing with a puppy and a storm drain, twelve years back.

\---

Of all the people Furiosa knows in town, the only one who might be angry about the situation is Ms Brown, who knows a little more than the girls, is a little wiser, and was in heavy back when the womyn were involved in some of their more criminal enterprises. Furiosa knows she’ll have to tell her eventually.

Right now, though, she figures the story can wait, until Auntie Brown has it more on her own authority, rather than Furiosa’s, that this is one of the good ones, that this isn’t a guy they have to be worried about. She forgets all about Officer Rockatansky, anyways, when she comes into her kitchen after work a couple of days later, and finds not just Auntie Brown waiting for her, but Valkyrie, too.

It’s not good news, she can see by the looks on their faces. Furiosa gets down the bourbon, and three glasses, and joins them at the table, ready to hear just how bad it really is.

Valkyrie isn’t the kind of woman who pulls her punches. Almost as windswept and wild looking as Auntie Brown, she sits nearly as tall as Furiosa, and handles her bike like a demon. When the womyn of her mother’s generation had begun to despair that their daughters were leaving them, as many had, the orphans like Valkyrie had been the answer. While Furiosa had slipped gently out of the tight knot of the group, Valkyrie had found a desperately needed home instead, practically in her place. 

While Furiosa had left the wild and pursued a GED, an eventual degree, and then instead her trade certification, Valkyrie had spent her years _unlearning_ polite society instead, giving up on formal education as a path, walking away from property and the abstract concept of ownership, from men, from many other things. They’ve remarked to one another before that they met somewhere in the middle, somehow, balancing one another out, each as civil (and as feral) as each other in their approaching middle ages. The difference between them is that Furiosa likes being the stability, the safe spot for the wounded to land, whereas Valkyrie wants to be the one to ride into battle, wants to bring the fight.

It’s part of why the intensely violent impulse that takes Furiosa over now feels unfamiliar, like a skin long shed, why she’s startled to realize that riding isn’t going to be enough this week, that she’s going to set the tin cans up on the fence out back and shoot them down, one at a time, until it stops feeling like this.

Splendid, it seems, had been captured in a photograph in the waiting room of her obstetrician’s practice. No one knows yet whether she was aware she was being photographed, and whether or not she signed a release, but they do know that the photo has been serving as one of the banner images for the office’s website.

“If they’d staked the place out, they wouldn’t have had to wait for long,” Valkyrie murmurs, taking the bottle from her and pouring the drinks, while Furiosa stares at the laptop and at Splendid, who looks incandescent, resting one hand on the top of her belly, and with her head tipped back against the wall, eyes gently shut.

“We’ll let you know when we have something more.” Valkyrie promises, as she presses the glass into Furiosa’s hand, and slowly, inexorably, shuts the screen. “And when we do something about it, if we can do something about it without putting you and your house at risk, we’ll let you know.”

She has the uneasy feeling that this might mean a storm on the horizon, but doesn’t know that it bothers her. Now that her suspicions have a hook to hang on, have more of a shape, she wants the war to come to her.

\---

The next day is perversely beautiful, given Furiosa’s mood, but then, most days this month are hot, sunny, and baked blue and red. The dawn beats her to Max every morning now, and she gets her coffee from him in full daylight. He’s gone back to his quiet, since she guessed his secret, eyes slipping too easily away from hers.

She thinks of their night in the grocery store, in the post office. Thinks of Splendid, head tipped back in repose, hand resting peacefully on her stomach.

Furiosa clears her throat, takes her coffee, and leaves him, forgetting to pay, forgetting to tip.

\---

She comes back at lunch, because she’s being a lousy person, knows it, and doesn't like the feeling very much. Just for a second, she pokes her head in the doorway, and instructs him;

“Hey, stop off at Ms Brown’s on your way home from work, if you get a chance? There’s apparently some kind of thing with a tree.”

And she ducks out again, screen door clattering behind her, keenly aware of his stare on the back of her neck.


	5. cherry tree

It’s cheating. It’s the same trick she uses with the girls, the same one Ms Brown pulled just a few weeks ago, with Dag. She doesn’t even need to be there to see the beginning of it unfold. Furiosa knows Max's type, not chivalrous, precisely, but helpful, if tormented. After work Max probably went right up to his own front door, maybe even got into the living room, before turning around and crossing the street, ringing the doorbell and mumbling something about a tree, maybe?

Ms Brown would take it from there.

When the last car has left the garage for the day, Furiosa walks over to check the job out, in case they need help. She’s glad she did. Between Ms Brown’s unreliable back, and Dag’s cast, the idea of actually planting the small sapling had been basically an insurmountable task. Furiosa was already supposed to come over after work today to help finish digging the hole, to help place the thing in the ground. His participation in the process has been a serious help. Max’s broad shoulders have made short work of a digging job that it’d take even her some time to do. 

They're working him hard. He’s sweating through his shirt, but to their credit, so are Dag and Ms Brown. as they try to get the tree heaved upright, try to get it back towards the hole and in, root ends first. In her scheming, Furiosa had forgotten to take into account that bad leg of his, and is glad she got here in time to cross up the lawn, and lend him a hand in lifting and then steadying the sapling, while Dag and Ms Brown scoop rock and earth in to the edges of the hole, helping prop it upright.

When they step back, it looks good. It’s emerging at approximately the right degree angle from the ground, as close as they’re likely to get, and even though it’s lost a few leaves in the battle it seems to Furiosa that it’s likely to survive.

Auntie Brown claps the dust off her hands, and points at Max, who only affects the slightest of doubletakes.

“We’re not done with you. Go sit on the porch.”

She moves to head inside, and Dag trails in her step, picking leaves out of her long, blond hair while Furiosa wipes a hand over her buzzcut, doing a poor job at shaking off a little of the sweat. Max doesn’t look much better.

“It sounds worse than it is.” She promises, when he still looks unsettled, a few seconds later. “She’s just going to make you drink iced tea and give you a piece of pie.”

Furiosa has the distinct impression that Max really does consider bolting again, but then some sort of professional curiosity about the exact nature of this iced tea kicks in, and he decides to stick around. Furiosa heaves a sigh, and starts to walk up the path, headed at least for some shade.

She’d been half wrong about the tea and pie, but only in that she’d forgotten to take into consideration that she'd told Ms Brown last night about Max’s grocery predicament. As well as the tray with afternoon tea, he gets a share of the first of the summer vegetables. So far it’s just a small bunch of asparagus and a little young broccoli, tucked into a repurposed tub that used to be full of margarine. Max cradles it under one arm, and looks from Ms Brown to Furiosa with dawning realization that he is trapped, now, that he is going to be _minded_ and _fed,_ as surely as Furiosa and Dag, who have to good sense not to complain about it and are both tucking into their pie.

Furiosa tries not to feel too smug about it, given that it was almost shamefully easy. When Max slips away for the night, with a soft thank you, Ms Brown gives her a pat on the shoulder that Furiosa understands means that she did well.

\---

She doesn’t actually get out to the backyard until later that night, and by then, she isn’t really aching to get her hands gun the way she had been after talking with Valkyrie. Still, it feels good to set up the cans, check over and load the glock, and take the tins down again with her old, mean precision. The girls are used enough to this not to ask, or not to make too much of it, and she’d been careful to give Dag a heads up in advance, just in case. She’s far enough back from the house that the sound of the gun will be a distant pop, not the urgent crack she hears, even through her ear protection.

Furiosa fires until the magazine is empty, and then lets it drop to the ground, because in an actual fight you’ll never want to fumble with catching it. Practice, her mother used to say, however you mean to fight, because that’s the muscle memory that’s going to come back to you in the heat of the moment. Furiosa can reload a gun so fast she barely breaks her rhythm. He mother could do it without seeming to stutter at all.

She stays like that into the dark, well past the point where the visibility is too poor to continue shooting safely, just standing still, maintaining her grip until her wrist aches, training stamina back into hands that haven’t held a gun like she means it in a very long time.

\---

Over coffee the next morning, Max glares at her, but in a way that doesn’t quite manage to be frightening. Maybe if she were anyone else, yeah, but she just meets his gaze, plants her hand on the counter, and leans up casually, and waits while he fills up her water bottle, watching him work. She’d tried once, at home, to accomplish the same thing with the iced coffee, and the result had been something vinegary and strange.

Max bends for the coffee pot and grunts in discomfort, as he stretches a muscle in his lower back. She makes an empathizing sound, because hers is just the same today, and has a vision of sitting astride his hips, while he lies face down, of digging her thumbs into the sort tissue. She'd build the pressure up, slow as can be, until he twitched and arched from it, hands curling helplessly in the sheets.

Furiosa takes the coffee from him with a suddenly dry mouth, and forgets to pay, but doubles back before she reaches the door and drops change onto the counter, before jogging out again.

(This isn’t the time to be doing this. Not with an ex-cop. It’s possible that she is ever so slightly fucked.)

\---

Furiosa hadn’t been sure that Ms Brown would take to Max quite the way she did to Nux. He’s got enough violence in him that the prospect was a dicey one. But Ms Brown tells her, in her best cackle;

“I like what that boy does for the sway in your hips.”

And that, it seems, is enough. Max becomes possessed of a second job, helping his neighbours with the garden for an hour or so each day, after his shift is done, longer on his Sundays and Mondays. Dag had been deeply suspicious of this at first, had griped a little on the first few Wednesday dinners afterwards. She’d been reserved about it, no doubt out of respect for Furiosa, probably, but her distaste had nonetheless been clear.

Furiosa doesn’t blame her. The other girls have been here longer, but the Dag is new to their little bubble of sisterhood, is new to close relationships like the one she’s building with Ms Brown, and it’s hard to learn for the first time that there’s enough space in someone’s heart for more than one person. The problem will sort itself out, Furiosa knows, with every day that Dag steadily _isn’t_ replaced. It’s a kind of assuredness, a kind of security, that Furiosa knows she was lucky to be raised with.

Sure enough, not long after that, Dag murmurs, over dishes;

“I think Max’s lawnmower is broken.”

She says it with scorn, like there’s something wrong with him for it, or like who needs a lawnmower to begin with, but the condemnation is a little jumbled up, because it isn’t the point. The point is the message, and Dag testing out how this reciprocal system is going to work, sussing out the shape of their little community.

That’s how Furiosa ends up, next Sunday, over on Max’s porch, ringing his doorbell, toolbelt slung over her shoulder. She isn’t really working today, and has succumbed to the heat, given up her jeans and combat boots for a pair of shorts, some flip flops.

It's actually a lot more comfortable. The weather this week has been nudging up towards 38 degrees, and the only reason she stays in the heavier clothes is because they offer better protection in the shop. You can't work on cars in flip flops, and you can't really ride a motorcycle safely in bare legs, but since he is doing neither today she gets to be a little more close to comfortable.

When Max answers the door his eyes widen, in surprise at her and maybe a little bit at her outfit.

“Ms Brown wants me to fix the Miller’s lawnmower.” Furiosa informs him, taking the transaction entirely out of her hands and his- it’s something between two neighbours, something her aunt is making her do, for the people whose house he rents, so what business have they in saying otherwise? 

It’s only then she notices that he’s in trackpants, and what’s more, she can see the brace this time, on the outside of the fabric. To her inexpert eye, it looks like the kind of support you might wear in the few years recovering from a bad break. It looks like he probably needs to be in physio.

For once in her life, it’s her who has to glance up, and realize she’s been caught staring. Max is leaning on the doorframe, and looks supremely unconvinced, but in a tolerant sort of way. He nods an eventual acquiescence, and comes out to show her ‘round to the garage, where the thing is kept.

Together, they pull the machine out onto the front lawn, and Furiosa opens it up with a deft and loving touch. Sure, it’s just a lawnmower, the push kind with a string to get it started, not even one you can ride, but it’s still a machine that runs on gas and grease and the kind of attention that she so enjoys giving. This one is maybe fifteen years old and badly gummed up with crud and dust and old dead residue. She has it apart in a heartbeat, working on her knees in the grass, piece by piece, breathing a kind of life into the metal that it hasn’t seen in years. It’ll be fine. Hell, it’ll run another fifteen, by the time Furiosa is done with it.

“I’ve never really seen you work.” Max admits, startling her into glancing up, knocked out of her trance. Yeah, he’d spent that afternoon in the garage, but with him prickling the back of her neck and Capable chiming in every so often, plus her being under a car for most of it, no, she supposes he hasn’t. Furiosa rubs the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm, and knows, just _knows_ by the look on his face that she’s just given herself a smear of something across her face. Probably dirt.

When she doesn’t answer him, he turns to go inside. Furiosa can hear water running in the kitchen, and turns back to her work.

The mower comes back together quickly after that, and she drinks the glass of water Max brings her, then takes him up on his invitation to come into the shade, dusting the grass off her legs before falling into a seat on his porch. He settles down next to her, somewhat more restrainedly, and stretches the bad leg out, something in him decompressing slightly, leaving him ever so slightly more at ease. So it’s a thing with bad days and good, then.

She thinks about him out on the road, walking for hours, with a bag of food on his back, and looks up at his face. Tries to think of a way to reach out, and fails.

He sees it in her, is watching her quietly back, and breaks the silence.

“You’d better come have a look at the car then, hadn’t you?”

Furiosa grins so wide she bares all her teeth, her worry forgotten, because yeah, that’ll do.

\---

“Oh, _Max.”_

The car is beautiful. Furiosa isn’t a freak for them, not the way some of her classmates had been, or some of the girls back from the club, but she knows what she’s looking at and likes what she sees. In back of Max’s house is parked a 1973 Ford Falcon, in a gorgeous matte black. It looks low, and mean, and like something out of an action movie.

Forgetting to look over her shoulder to check if it’s all right, she steps up to the car and bends over to it, resting two hands on the hood, peering through the windscreen at the inside. It’s all dark leather. Before popping the hood, she looks over her shoulder at him for permission.

Max is leaning against the wall behind her, watching with a glitter in his eyes that she knows matches her own. He nods his permission, coming up to join her as she peers into the engine with him.

It actually looks fairly good. He leans in, and shows her the work he’s done, with his hands more than his words, and he knows enough about cars that she reads what he’s saying seamlessly. The parts she helped him procure, the ones he’d had already, the ones that are _old_ old, maybe as old as the car itself.

“The problem’s not under the bonnet,” Max admits, at last, straightening up, and so does she, “it’s the rest of the wiring. Come on.”

And yeah, she can see why that’s giving him trouble, when he takes her around to the passenger side window. The Fords of this day and age tended to be a bit of a mess to begin with, and whoever had it before him has tried to do some home repairs and done them badly. The loom behind the dash is a fucking catastrophe, and she’s already itching to reach out and just-

“Honestly? I’d start from scratch. This looks like spaghetti, and someone’s stuck insulating tape _everywhere_.”

“Firehazard.” He agrees, amiably, as she opens the door and leans in. As she does, she feels a careful touch. Not even a touch, actually, just the warmth of his hand, in the air, resting over the small of her back, ready to catch her if she overbalances.

Furiosa closes her eyes for a count of three, glad the mirrors are angled so he isn’t going to be able to see the look on her face. She knows she’s breathing all wrong, though, and knows that he knows.

Backing gently out of the vehicle, she shuts the door and puts her back up against it, leaning into the frame and looking at him.

“Bring it by the shop. You can use anything you need there, we can work on it together after you’re off, afternoons. The third bay is always empty anyways.”

This isn’t like his lawnmower, and they both know it. This is a something real, this is her cards on the table, a first overture. For the first time, just now, she remembers that day he’d come by and realizes that he’d been asking out to lunch, and she hadn’t done a damn thing about it.

Max moves in. With the car against her back, he steps in close, so they’re nearly toe to toe, so they’re no longer anywhere near casual, anywhere close to the realm of plausible deniability. She feels the hair on her arms stand up, even in this heat.

Five years ago, Furiosa’s jaw would have tilted up, proud and challenging. She’s in a place now where she knows she doesn’t need to lift it, that her head has been held high all along. Nothing that happens now will change that. Max has no misapprehensions that she’s going to need to correct. In the same way, she knows there are things that she can expect from him, and things that she can’t. They stand together, quietly, cautiously, so close she thinks she could count his eyelashes if she wanted. They’re testing the novel experience of being this near to one another.

\---  
Wednesdays are still nights for just Furiosa, Ms Brown and the girls. But this particular Wednesday, it is established by unanimous vote that _Saturdays_ will be Furiosa, Ms Brown, the girls, Nux and Max. 

Dag, the only potential holdout, has by now decided that she can characterize Max as ‘all right,’ albeit begrudgingly.

“He’s the only person in this whole place who hasn’t ‘oh poor deared’ me for the arm,” she confesses to Furiosa, with a remarkably low level of hostility, “he hasn’t even asked. Man knows how to keep his mouth shut, I’ll say that for him.”

The coffee shop is now closed Sundays after all, so it’s reasoned that they’ll all have the next morning to sleep in if things go late. The only one who waggles her eyebrows at the suggestion is Toast, so Furiosa ignores her, too, like she has frankly no idea to what she might be referring.

Toast works Fridays at Debbie’s, now, as well as a job as a receptionist two towns over, which pays better but only offers three days a week. It isn’t really her thing, and Furiosa thinks there’s a chance they’re going to lose her to the lure of a city before long, unless she can find something a little more stimulating. While she’s at a loss for where her life is going to take her, though, there isn’t a single better place to be.

Still, it’s a relief, walking in to the kitchen, to find Toast at the table reading the details of a catalogue for what is clearly a selection of correspondence courses.

“Gem cutting?” Toast asks her, “Or technical writing?”

She’s being facetious, which is a pretty normal reaction for her when she’s being overwhelmed, so Furiosa pulls down two glasses and gets them both water, coming to join her at the table, just as Toast throws down the papers in frustration, and looks up at her.

“This is awful.”

“It’s hard, not knowing where to begin.” Furiosa allows, pushing the water at her, before sipping her own. “But you don’t have to get it one hundred percent right on the first go around, Toast. Did I ever tell you about university?”

No, she gathers she hadn’t, given the look Toast shoots up at her. Furiosa nods.

“I started in a women’s studies department, but it was too theoretical for me. So, I moved into engineering, and did most of a degree.”

“ _Woah,_ really?” Toast is too nice to ask what the hell happened, but it’s written all over her face. Furiosa doesn’t mind. The women teach to share the truths of your stumbles, as well as your successes.

“I didn’t have the interpersonal skills for what those faculties were like back then, and when it occurred to me that those were _also_ the guys I’d be working alongside when I graduated, I up and quit.” Things are better, twenty years later, but not by nearly enough, from what she hears. ‘Interpersonal skills’ is a euphemism here for patience, and if she’d stuck around it’d be only a matter of time until she’d thrown a punch. “And anyways, I liked working with my hands more than I ever wanted to sit behind a desk and run theoretical models.”

Her work now is a natural fit, but it had taken a shot or two to figure that out.

“So what should I _do?_ ” Asks Toast, soothed, but not entirely calm, so Furiosa takes her normal approach, and suggests the tools to solve the problem, if not the solution itself.

“Read the list, and pick a few that you think might be interesting. Learn a little more about them, and sign up for the one that grabs you the most. If it’s a good fit, if it’s something you think you could live with studying for a little while, think about what you might like to _do_ with it, and go from there.”

In the end, Toast settles on political science, which is an interesting fit, but one Furiosa figures is going to teach her somewhere, either way.

\---

The great black beast limps along fine at a few kilometers an hour, so Max pulls her into the garage the next day. Even like this, Furiosa likes how he drives, likes how he backs in with one steady pull, a slow, long look over his shoulder. She leans in the doorframe of the office and watches, catches the wink he throws her before the keys turn in the ignition and he slinks out of the car. Max hangs them up on a hook on the side of the wall, without needing to be asked, without imploring her not to use them unless she has to.

She makes him a cup of instant coffee, then gets to watch his face twist in utter dismay when he takes his first sip, looking from it to her like she might be offended if he suggests putting it down the drain, or that she has possibly mistaken the coffee for radiator fluid.

“This explains,” he eventually settles on, in his careful way, “ _so_ much.”

“I know.” 

But she takes the mug back from him, and dumps it into her own, already half drained, so she can finish both. His expression suggests that some sort of physical intervention may be necessary, but he apparently restrains himself, and together they lapse into comfortable silence, which stretches until her next customer arrives, and chases him on out of the shop.

\---

Furiosa tells Max and Nux about their dinner invitation later that week. Their tiny fan has developed a hiccup, a jarring grind when it rotates all the way to the left, three annoying clicks before it turns its’ head back in the other direction. 

Nux is too afraid of her to ask, and Max seems totally oblivious to the problem, so Furiosa just gets it down off the counter, borrows the small (though admittedly quite well stocked) toolbox from the back, and opens the thing up for them, there on one of the little tables. 

The jarring thing is that, for once, there are actually other people in the shop, as well. Furiosa is here in the mornings, generally at the crack of dawn, and sometimes around noon, where more people are interested in eating than having a coffee and a brownie or a lemon square. Now, at three in the afternoon, the other tables are at full occupancy. Nux is talking to her, but Max is actually doing his job. She’s not nuts about it, to be perfectly honest, feels a little territorial about the whole thing. Furiosa screws a plate back in with exceptional vehemence.

“Can we bring anything?” Nux wants to know.

“Wine, probably.” Furiosa says, without really focusing. “Whiskey, if you’re feeling brave, but Ms Brown will drink you both under the table.”

Nux has probably never had a drink of whiskey in his life, but looks disbelieving. Max, who most certainly _has,_ looks contemplative, and then nods an easy agreement, because yeah, he thinks she probably could. The fan fixes up nice and easy.

Dinner, on the other hand, is an unmitigated and total disaster.


	6. trust and love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has left a review. I haven't been able to respond to them individually the last couple of days, because the writing for this thing has now kicked into high gear, but you guys are like, the wind beneath my wings and the reason when I do chapter fic I tend to marathon write. I super appreciate it and read and squeak over every one.
> 
> Second, a little update; I'm along enough ahead now to know there will be ten chapters in this thing and an epilogue. Most of them are down on paper in their barest forms and are being tweaked into full quality as we speak.

Back when Splendid had first arrived at the house, she hadn’t known she was pregnant. 

They met out at a diner on the highway three hours out of town, where Furiosa arrived early, got them a table, and kept an eye out for anyone else lingering too long in the place. One call on a prepaid cell phone later, and the bike had roared up the road, pulled into the lot. The woman got off the bike, a nervous young lady trailing with her, clutching a little bag that contained two t-shirts, two pairs of underwear, and a wallet full of cards she'd probably not end up using again.

Furiosa stood to greet them, kissing her sister on the cheek before offering Angharad a warm hand to shake and an encouraging smile. They’d sat in the booth together and drank a cup of tea, while she adjusted to the idea of leaving the one woman she’d been paired with so far, into the care of another. When the women first arrive some are relieved, some are tired, some are angry, and others are skittish as new colts. They know how to take their time with the frightened ones.

“I know they’ve gone over this with you already, but here it is again.” Slow and steady, as much eye contact as the girl could handle, don’t force the issue. “You’re coming to my set of apartments. This safe house is in the town of Citadel, population about six hundred. Even so, the locals don’t actually know what kind of place it is. As far as they’re concerned I run a house for lodgers that offers very reasonably priced rent, and advertises in the city for people looking to take some country air. None of the other girls will tell anyone anything, all of them have been through a lot. You’ll have a private room, with a minifridge and a microwave, but there’s a full kitchen on the main floor that you’re going to be welcome to share. There aren’t any pets. Sometimes a girl comes through with a cat or dog, but those are just emergency placements, my house doesn’t really work for animals in the long term. For all intents and purposes, I’m your landlord and you’re my tenant. I’ll check up on you, but I don’t control you, and your time is your own. We’re not actually going to ask for rent, either, unless you’re working and have something you think you can contribute to the household upkeep.”

It was a lot of information, but as she said, a lot of it was pure repetition, and she likes going over the banal stuff in such careful detail, talks with a careful rhythm and an easy professionalism. Angharad nods along.

“They say I’m supposed to pick something new to call myself.” She’d confided to Furiosa, as though she weren’t aware of how it worked. She managed a gentle smile, and explained

“They do that, when a woman needs new ID.” Thanks to Joe’s ties to organized crime, and the weird zealotry, that definitely qualified Angharad Chrichton for the whole works. “It’s so that when you’re ready to begin doing some of the things you used to do before, you can do it without worrying. Do you know what you’re going to pick?”

She’d shaken her head. Moira, the other rider at the table, had beamed a gaptoothed smile, as this poor, shaken up, beat up young person sitting between them had plucked up the courage and announced, grimly, with a mettle to her that Furiosa hadn't expected her to find right away.

“Well, I think the idea of starting over from scratch sounds just splendid, right about now.”

\---

No one expected the dinner to be unawkward, at first, and mercifully, no one does crack open the hard liquor. Later, Toast will remark that she knew it was a mistake the moment Furiosa decided to keep the arm on. On family nights, when the girls are going to do the washing, when she’s home and ready to be really at ease, the prosthetic goes away for the night, to give her neck and shoulders a bit of a break.

The thing is, before the food is even in the oven, there’s a voicemail from Valkyrie waiting for her when she arrives home. _I’m calling you tomorrow, I think we know something._

There isn’t a chance in the world of reaching them now, out on the road. When they need to reach out for stuff like this, it's all prepaid cells, and the one she'd left the message from turns up disconnected right away. Furiosa is just going to have to sit through the meal and wait for the morning. It’s no big deal. Logically, the amount of worry she puts into it isn’t going to impact the outcome either way in the slightest, after all. She has to just shut this part of her mind off. Compartmentalize, right?

Of course, Max sees it in her the minute he’s through the door, and gives her a searching look that sets her teeth on edge. While the others fly ahead to the dining room, Capable drawing Nux by the hand to give him the whole tour, Furiosa hangs back with him, to try to apologize. It’s physically impossible to get the words out, of course, because there’s so much shit going on that he doesn’t know about, but right from the beginning of the evening inviting him here seems suddenly like an incredibly decadent mistake.

“Max,” says Ms Brown, from the kitchen, “don’t let her keep you with one foot in the door, boy, come in.”

He glances at her first, to make sure that he should, and something unclenches ever so slightly in her chest, enough for her to manage;

“It’s fine, go on in.”

Under Ms Brown’s watchful eye, it’s impossible to reach out and touch his hand, but her fingers twitch towards his, and his towards hers in return, so quick she might have missed it if she weren’t watching. Warmed by relief, she follows after him as he heads in to her home.

The most merciful thing about the whole affair is maybe that Cheedo is out at work. It’s a nighttime shoot, and not the sort of thing she could get out of. As the most fragile of the girls, the least resilient to conflict and mayhem, it’s for the best. 

The meal itself goes well. The food is delicious, the vegetables are fresh, the pie is hot. After dinner, Dag, Toast and Ms Brown take Nux outside to show him the eucalyptus growing in the backyard. In the kitchen, Capable bends Max’s ear about her favourite pieces on the piano, and Max stands up to his elbows in sudsy water at the sink, washing the dinner dishes. Capable has a tea towel, drying and putting away as he goes. Furiosa leans with her back against the fridge, drinking water, supervising, and occasionally lending a hand with finding the original homes of some of the more obscurely placed pots and pans and odds and ends. 

The moment is homey. Max is quiet, Capable is easy to listen to, and Furiosa is finally beginning to forget about the call, when it happens. It goes so quickly that she doesn’t have a chance to stop it, that she doesn’t realize until a second or two after it _has_ happened, what she just heard. One second, Capable is talking about Furiosa, herself, in a slyly complimentary way, because the girls still don’t know that she and Max have hit their own strange version of an ignition switch already, out back in his garage. The next, she says;

“And it isn’t very many people who’d have the time, you know, to run their own business _and_ operate a safehouse for battered women on the run.”

“Capable.” Furiosa says, very mildly, as Max looks over at her in surprise, and then in worry. Both of them are staring at her, and she stares back at then, with an acute feeling of longing to turn back time, like the second after a glass of red wine smashes into white carpet.

 _“Capable,”_ she says again, much more seriously this time, because there are rules, there are sure as _hell_ rules about who you tell and when, and none of those rules can even be remotely bent, definitionally stretched, to encompass Max, the guy from down the road. “Capable, what are you doing?”

She’s a smart girl, is the thing, almost wickedly bright, normally even reserved, but right now she’s staring at Furiosa like the fact that she’d be mad wouldn’t even occur to her. Max draws his hands out of the sink, and is toweling them off, looking uncomfortable about the fact that he’s standing almost directly between them, but clearly with nowhere else he can go without blatantly slinking away from this.

“Furiosa.” Capable has the good grace to sound mortified, but that doesn’t even begin to mollify what Furiosa is feeling, the hammering, howling panic tightening in her chest, because these things are secrets for a reason. “It’s fine. It’s Max. He’s- you know, he’s a good guy, he’s a police officer, and-”

It might still have been all fine, but then she says that, and Furiosa puts her glass carefully down onto the counter, because her hands are shaking.

“A police officer? A you fucking kidding me?” Capable flinches, and Max does too. Furiosa can hear her own voice shaking with frustration, then with fury. “Do you have _any_ idea how often this place gets cop’s wives staying? How hard it is with a husband whose police buddies won’t respond to your complaints or press charges? How much trouble we have with those manhunting systems getting used for the wrong reasons, and the force turning a blind eye to a little ‘domestic conflict’ for one of their own?”

It isn't an exaggeration. They’re literally one of the most overrepresented, most dangerous groups there are, and everyone who works with the network knows that the worst thing you can do when you get a bad cop is try to go to his coworkers. She only catches a bare glimpse of Max’s blank face. Capable, on the other hand, who she’s locking eyes with, looks destroyed, looks about to burst into tears- and that’s about the exact moment where Nux walks into the kitchen.

He’s smiling. Later, Furiosa will feel bad about the fact that he was smiling, because right there and then she rounds on him, and finds herself raising her voice, barking,

“Back the _fuck_ out, Nux, I swear-”

Nux looks for all the world like he’s a dog crashing unexpectedly headlong into an electric fence, and Furiosa is already feeling her first stab of guilt, as Capable shouts a wordless, defensive protest, because she’ll take it, fine, but is not going to stand for someone rounding on him.

“Hey.” Max says, short and quiet, and hearing his calm, Furiosa becomes truly aware that she has lost her grip on this situation, and on her temper. She turns and strides for the door, enough menace roiling off her that Nux actually skitters to the side, like she might take a swing at him. Instead, she storms past, and out into the night.

Dag, Toast, and Ms Brown are responding to the sound of raised voices, and it’s only Ms Brown’s hands holding the two girls back that keeps them from bounding up to her, stopping her on the way past, trying to ask questions. She snarls something at the old woman along the lines of ‘please deal with this,’ without any of the please, and makes it back up the yard to her rooms, shutting the door behind her with a slam and then staggering back against it, putting her face in her hands. Then, just once, she bites down on her palm and permits herself one good, long, muffled scream.

The little house out back where Furiosa lives has two stories. The downstairs has a couch, a counters, her bookshelves, a kitchen table covered with bits and pieces of saved machinery, and not a lot of floorspace. The upstairs is little better, a loft bedroom with sloped ceilings on one side, but a lot less clutter. She storms up there, for lack of anywhere better to go, and flings the windows open wide to try to let some of the night in, because right now it’s impossible to catch her breath in here for some reason.

Furiosa paces the room once, twice, and then goes back to the window, to the desk sitting in front of it, and collapses there, with her forehead resting against the wood, eyes tightly shut, chest heaving, willing herself silent.

Logical thought is slow to filter in. When it does, however, a couple of things seem obvious.

No one else is going to die because Capable likes Max a little too much. For that matter, and because that's only half of what this is about, no one else is going to die because Furiosa likes Max a little too much. She’s feeling the news from that phone call, and she’s overreacting because of it, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that out. The straps of her prosthetic arm, wrapped tight around her shoulders and chest, suddenly feel constricting, almost suffocating. She undoes the buckles with unsteady hands, and sheds the thing quickly, dropping it down onto the bed.

She’s overreacting. Capable was being reckless, yes, but Furiosa isn’t in this to train her girls to never trust anyone, ever again. She shouldn’t have bitten her head off. She especially shouldn’t have bitten her head off in front of company. She’d probably gone at least part of the way to humiliating her, even without strictly meaning to, and had no cause. Everything with Max aside, she's going to owe Capable an apology later.

Max. The thought of him sends a spasm of disappointment through her chest. Furiosa is thirty nine years old, and a heterosexual woman, and most certainly knows the score by now. She knows there are truths that you cannot say to men, in front of men, and expect them to keep looking at you the same way. She rubs her hand hard over her eyes, and steels her resolve for what is inevitably going to come. If it stings just a little more keenly this time than the others, well, at least she knows she can still live with herself in the morning.

Max’s voice is drifting up through the window, from the garden outside. For a second she thinks she’s losing it, but there’s Dag, too. Dag, angry Dag, _new_ Dag, who doesn’t know the place very well yet, and doesn’t know that conversations had in the back of the house come easily up into Furiosa’s open window. If she closes the glass now, she’ll give herself away, and anyways, she can’t bring herself to move just yet.

“I don’t think she thinks you’re gonna sell us up the river to your cop buddies, like, you specifically.” Dag is saying, delivering Furiosa’s apology for her, maybe, or just processing. 

“I know.” Max answers, simply, and Furiosa hears a long pause, the shuffling of movement, an uncertain hum, Dag’s. She is going to close the window on what comes next, no matter what her prickled dignity tells her to do, because she doesn't make a habit of eavesdropping. Only then, Max explains;

“Furiosa, she’s on the front lines of something, with you girls. She’s fighting a war that many people don’t choose to see. One of the things they throw at her, at you all, is the easy lie that because you love someone, they’ll never hurt you.”

She imagines Dag nodding, hears something that may be a miserable little hitched intake of breath. He's right, after all, everyone comes to her dealing in some way with the disappointment of learning the truth behind that one.

“That woman knows that that’s a lie, and that’s gotta make loving someone complicated. Now, this thing between us, it’s new, it’s careful, it’s such a long way off from that yet, it's- Christ knows I’ve got my own stuff we’re likely to hit well before then. What I am saying is, I knew getting into it that she’s the kind of woman who’ll love someone long before she decides to trust ‘em.”

Furiosa finds herself slipping down the stairs before she knows she’s even moved.

From the doorway, she can see Dag and Max, silhouetted in the light from the house down the hill. Dag looks thoughtful, maybe a little rattled, but is clearly seriously considering what he has said. Max is too hard to read from this distance. What she can see is that, as she pushes the screen door open a crack, they both turn to face her.

Furiosa’s eyes are bone dry, and her back is straight and strong. She waits like that, two fingers on the door frame, holding it open a crack, until Max catches on. He glances at Dag, clicks his tongue like he’s shooing a horse, and jerks his head to nod down at the big house. Dag trots right off, understanding making her momentarily obedient, and Furiosa pushes the door open a few inches more. She slips cautiously out onto the step.

Max steps over, slowly, carefully, boots crunching on the gravel, and warns her;

“None of that was said for your benefit, yeah?”

Checking casually to make sure she knows it wasn’t performance- no, to make sure she knows it wasn’t pity. She has little patience for that, and he expects it, knows it.

Rather than answering, Furiosa reaches out to him, takes him by the collar, and asks;

“Would you please come here?”

Max, who she’s thinking of now as her Max, is happy to oblige. 

He’s strong about it, takes her by the waist and puts her up against the wall of her house, kisses her fiercely, kisses her with a hand on her jaw and another on her hip, kisses her with none of his usual gentle deference. He kisses her like he wants her to know that he isn’t afraid. Furiosa snakes her arm about his neck, and presses herself in to him, easy and eager and so, so pleased not to have lost the promise of him.

It goes on until he needs to catch a breath, leaves them standing together and panting, with one of his broad hands resting, spread, over the span of her ribs. Furiosa feels another pang, thinking of his hands in the dishwater, and kisses him again, and then again. He permits it, with unending patience.

In the end, he finally pleads for mercy, putting a hand in the centre of her chest and pulling his hips away from hers with a rueful laugh. Her body tilts, trying to chase his, but she bites her bottom lip and drops her head reluctantly back against the siding.

She doesn’t think, like she might normally, of pointing out their mutual secrets and the value of keeping his mouth shut if he wants the news of his time as a cop to stay quiet in the town. She doesn’t even pause to consider the need _ask_ for his discretion, for the girls’ sake if not for hers. She turns her head instead, to kiss the palm of his hand, as his thumb strokes carefully along her cheek, and the crickets send up a piercing song into the night sky.


	7. mole cricket

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the point in the story where the rating takes a jump. If you're not comfortable with more graphic sexual content, thank you for reading thus far but from this point on I'm pretty sure it's turtles, all the way down.

Capable accepts Furiosa’s apology the next morning with another tearful torrent of an explanation. She wasn’t thinking, she didn’t know, she should have realized, it was all her fault, and now poor Max; Furiosa listens and nods and listens and then finally interjects that no, Capable doesn’t have to be sorry, never to do it again, but that it had been an understandable mistake and that she and Max had talked it through and everything was going to be fine, and they’d make it up to Nux next week- in fact, Furiosa will stop in on him in the shop before then and apologize to him, too.

It calms Capable down to a reasonable level, and they head into town for the day together, where Capable has an audition that Furiosa can take her to (she plays a pretty reasonable piano, has been trying that kind of work out) and the pair of them can do something approaching a little bit of shopping. Furiosa has no patience for it, but appreciates the social value of this kind of ‘girl time.’ She prefers girl time at shooting ranges, but knows how to operate within someone else’s comfort zone. For one thing, she still feels sorry enough to be indulgent, trying on the odd thing that Capable recommends. There’s one blood red square of fabric, a cross between a sarong and a scarf, that would maybe do her well in the cold nights of the approaching fall, but it’s a little too much to tuck into a jacket on the bike. She leaves it behind, and trails the rest of the afternoon in Capable’s step, taking the time together to catch up on her news.

Things with Nux are going well. Capable confides that all that bubbling energy is the ghostly ripples of what is an almost entirely successfully medicated case of bipolar. She hurts for him, she admits to Furiosa, but is glad she’s found a man who knows some of the hard things in the world. Furiosa feels her stomach flip in guilt again, and resolves that yes, she absolutely will apologize to Nux properly this week.

After slipping into the bar on her own for a half hour or so, Capable gets the gig. It’s a night a week, for little more than tips, and Furiosa doesn’t point out that that amounts to considerably less when you take gas into account, because triumph this sweet isn’t something you try to subdue. The point isn’t the practicality of it, not today. The point is that Capable is finding her feet, and that Furiosa is very, very proud of her.

\---  
That evening, back at the house, the call from Valkyrie comes. Furiosa leans her back up against the cabinet, plants her feet squarely, closes her eyes, and says;

“What do you know?”

“One of Joe’s guys, known on the street as the People Eater,” which leads Furiosa to think for a moment, Jesus, who are these fucking people? “they were definitely in your neck of the woods the weekend that our girl went missing.”

“How are you sure?”

“Traffic ticket, can you believe it? One of our friendlies on the force found the guy, Anton Shewchuk, listed as having an unpaid fine. From there, we checked around with the hotels, the pretty standard billing inquiry, and we found him on file.”

She knows how it goes, has done it herself in the past; call a hotel, complain about an overbilled credit card, no, no idea why, but just higher than she was expecting, and could they please tell her what her husband had charged to the account before she filed a dispute with the credit card company? It didn’t play so well in the big cities, not in the last ten years or so, but the country joints had pretty non-standardized training and poor security procedures, for the most part.

“Joe’s guys typically go out in team’s of two, so we’re going to see if we can’t track down who might have been with him, and take it from there.”

“Right,” says Furiosa, sinking slowly down the wood panel, sitting on the kitchen floor like that, bracing the prosthetic up on her knees to stretch out her shoulders. She doesn’t know what Valkyrie hears in her tone, but it makes her pause to check;

“You doing okay? Anything happen on your end?”

“Nothing.” Except- she hears the hesitation in her own voice, hears the pause hang long. Valkyrie hears it too.

“Ah?”

“Yeah. If I gave you a name, Val, is there any chance you could check him out for me?”

The tenor of Valkyrie’s voice changes, and Furiosa can tell she’s spooked her.

“Sure thing. If someone there is giving you a bad feeling, Furiosa, you trust your gut though, don’t wait for my source to come through...”

“It’s nothing like that.” She pauses, decides what she wants to say. “It’s a guy in town. The women have taken a shine to him. Being honest, they’re not the only ones.”

“Oh.” Says Valkyrie, rather more surprised by this than she would have been by a hostile showing up in the situation, this close to their place. “So, a really discrete check up, then.”

“Yeah.” Furiosa agrees. “He’s an ex-cop, is the thing, or I wouldn’t be asking. I just don’t want to find out... he seems like a good guy, and the other day one of the girls got a little casual, and- I just want to check. I don’t want anyone to break into anything illegal, but if you’ve got someone sitting at a desk who can just promise me he wasn’t fired for giving working girls starlight tours or anything.”

“Yeah, no, of course.” Valkyrie answers, and Furiosa knows she’s over explaining, can hear it in the gentle way Valkyrie is talking to her now. “You’ve got his name?”

“Max Rockatansky.”

\---

Nux accepts her apology with an uncomplicated ease that makes her think considerably more of him.

“You were upset. I understand. I didn’t take it personally.”

She’ll try to remember those words for the times in her life she needs them. Instead, she makes a joke about him being allowed to borrow her buzzcutter, if he ever needs it, while making a zipping gesture to indicate his own closely shaved head. He beams at her, unreservedly, and pours her an iced coffee, on the house.

It tastes nothing like when Max makes it, but she thanks him anyways, and takes it back to her shop.

\---

The last person that leaves her to see for the first time since it happened is, of course, Max himself. She wants to do it when she can see him properly, so actually stops in at Starbucks on Tuesday to try to skip their thirty seconds together. Then she spends three minutes pulling the door handle, wondering why their posted hours say they should be open, before stepping back and realizing that Toast’s predictions have come true, that the signage in the window declares that the franchise has upped and moved on out of the town of Citadel.

Furiosa spends a while staring at the place in shock, wondering about insurance fires, before biting the bullet and walking back in the direction of the Open Road.

Max looks the closest thing she’s ever seen to _irate_ on him. He exclaims, right as she comes through the door;

“ _Three_ lattes. Already. Three.”

On account of the Starbucks being closed, right, the commuting out of Citadel office-set _would_ all land in his lap all of a sudden. His expression is a kind of playful hellfire, like he’s determined full well to train them back into drinking normal coffees and he has several horrible ideas as to how, and Furiosa thinks she could probably easily clear the counter in a clean vault and be on him, if it weren’t for the stacks of cups, lids and other bric-a-brac in the way.

“Well, make mine a normal coffee. Hot today.” She settles for instead. His expression melts into a much cleaner kind of good humour, and he gives her a tiny thumbs up, before going to pour her a cup. 

\---

Later, he turns up in her garage, and he’s a little different. It isn’t stressful work, exactly, she gathers, but she can tell in his step that he has had a long day, has used up some sort of internal resource on it that has yet to replenish. He looks her in the eye, looks away, then forces himself to look back again.

She nods him over at his car, and slips inside to flip the ‘back in 5 minutes’ sign onto the door, not bothering to lock it behind herself. It’s just one fifteen, the end of his shift, so it’s true when she says;

“I haven’t grabbed lunch yet. The keys are in the top desk drawer if you need to lock the place up when I’m gone. In the mean time, knock yourself out.”

Furiosa leaves Max, dumbfounded, to enjoy his privacy. She strides off, to pick up a sandwich from Debbie’s. Sensing a market opportunity in the wake of the Starbucks closure, Debbie has gone into the business of selling them, home made by the proprietoress herself, saran wrapped and fresh each morning. They’re actually not half bad.

When she does come back, considerably more than five minutes later, he’s deep in his car’s dashboard and so absorbed that doesn’t even notice her footsteps on the concrete, so she slips into the office to catch up on a couple of hours of paperwork.

\---

Things regress for a couple of days. Her overwhelming impression is that Max is processing something, and needs the brakes pumped while he works through this thing of his, whatever it is. That, or maybe they just don’t remember how to get close to one another physically, like now that she’s made the first move they don’t know how to re-make it.

In fact, neither of them minds. She knows this, because Max gives her looks of soulful relief whenever they don’t quite touch, and because she herself likes the wait. He, she thinks, is waiting on her, but is simultaneously hoping she’ll give him a little longer. She figures they’re about where they would have been, if she hadn’t needed so very badly the other night.

Furiosa takes the time to let the fire stoke.

Plus, it _tortures_ the girls, Dag and Cheedo in particular. Dag, because she likes Max in earnest and is impatient to have him around more, especially now that some of his gardening time is going into Furiosa’s garage instead. Cheedo, because she’s an incurable romantic, has always fallen for bad boys, hard and fast. Furiosa doesn’t mind that part, either.

\---

They’re at Ms Brown’s when she gets the phone call. The tomatoes have come into season with such astonishing prolificness that Ms Brown, Furiosa, Max, Dag and even Toast are all filling baskets with the things when the phone starts ringing back inside. Ms Brown pulls off her gardening gloves and plods off to go answer.

“Oh my _God,_ ” says Toast, rearing back a few seconds later, with enough alarm that Max jerks in response, and Furiosa leans over to see what’s the matter. It’s Dag who figures it out first.

“Oh, hey, a mole-cricket.” She reaches over past Toast, who _lunges_ out of the way, nearly upending a basket of the tomatoes in her haste. Furiosa peers closer, though to be fair she doesn’t have to peer much. The mole cricket is about as long as Dag’s hand, five centimeters or so from hands to tail- and yes, the thing has hands. Little shovel-like things that Furiosa assumes are carapaces, but look awfully like the front feet of an actual mole, plus the back end of a cricket from hell. If Dag dropped it, Furiosa is sure she would hear the thump.

Furiosa doesn’t normally buy into the hype she used to get back in North America about everything in Australia being meant to kill you. Yet, she will admit to herself that she finds the thing in Dag’s hand genuinely a little unsettling. She’s not nearly as bad as Toast, who is still bouncing on the balls of her feet ever so slightly because it was _near_ her, but Furiosa can’t say she’d be pleased to find one in the shower. Max, laconic as always, has gone back to picking tomatoes.

“Furiosa!”

Ms Brown is calling from the house, a phone in hand that Furiosa recognizes as one of their prepaid burner cells. Furiosa rests her hand on Max’s shoulder and uses it to push herself to her feet, before heading over to the house to take the call. She slips into the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Hey my love.” Valkyrie says, with warmth in her voice. “I’ve got a good news call for you.”

It may be the first time those words have ever actually left her mouth on the phone to Furiosa, and they’re both aware of the very pleasant change. Normally she and Valkyrie only talk when a problem has come up. Max seems like he’s out of earshot, but just in case that changes, Furiosa leads in with the apparent nonsequitor;

“He’s over right now, actually, helping the girls garden.”

“Gotcha. I’ll be specific, then, and ask yes or no questions. The guy I’m looking at is your height, built, sandy brown hair. If I gave you some of his body tattoos, any chance you could ID him for sure for me?”

This, she supposes, is teasing. She drums her fingernails on the case of the phone and answers with a very, very casual;

“No.”

“More’s the pity, going by his photo.” Valkyrie had set that one up for her to walk into “Not that I’m that way inclined, but I can see it, objectively speaking. Well, you can put your fears to rest. Rockatansky has a couple of commendations, a strong service record, and then some paperwork on him that my source tells me means medical, line of duty type stuff. Recovery leave, then back again for about a year more on active duty, then we get stress leave, a gently worded letter from someone who seems to have seen a psych evaluation that we don’t have access to, and an eventual resignation. She says it’s a pretty typical pattern, and if she met him on the streets, she’d wish him the best.”

Furiosa watches out the window, where Dag is trying to distract Max from the tomatoes with the bug, holding it out for him to see more closely, then leaning it back, resting it against her chest. Furiosa watches it scuttle across the top of her breasts. There is something deeply wrong with that girl.

“Furiosa?”

Max, who looks up at the window and catches her watching, then back to Dag without any apparent concern.

“Thanks, Valkyrie, that’s what I needed to hear.”

“Any time.”

She hangs up the call and stores the cell away in the drawer, then comes out to the porch, where the tomato pickers have approached. Max and Toast are setting down the baskets of vegetables, Dag is still holding that cricket.

“I think he likes you, Max,” she says, holding it out to him, and apparently not for the first time, Furiosa gathers, because Ms Brown makes an exasperated tutting noise and Toast bolts inside the screen door, for protection.

This time, though, and maybe because of his audience, Max turns to Dag and the cricket, and moves to take it from her, into his big, gentle hands. He holds the thing up to his face, close enough to get a really good look at it, and to make Furiosa swallow.

Then, Max leans in and _licks_ the mole cricket, one long swipe down its back.

“Okay, _no._ ” Furiosa says, as that sets off every single instinct she has in her body, making her take three fast steps backwards. Toast shrieks from the doorway. Even Ms Brown, who has seen some things in her time, is looking grimly impressed. Dag, though, is staring at Max with total abject adoration, like he is her new favourite person in the whole wide universe.

As he bends down to release the cricket into one of the flower bushes, Max says to Dag, with the indulgent, playful tone of a parent to a child;

“Tasted more indifferent, to me.”

\---

Dinner is fresh tomato soup. They’re so ripe and so new from the garden you can practically taste the sun on them. The group meal, the second time around having Max and Nux, goes much better than the first. The most eventful thing is that happens is Toast muttering dark comments about straining the soup for cricket parts. Only Nux is credulous enough to believe her, and looks into his bowl with more confusion than actual concern.

They sit side by side, piled in tight around the little table, and Furiosa feels Max’s hand squeeze her knee, just once, towards the end of the evening. She hides a smile into her cup, and offers;

“Come for a ride with me after dinner? I can drop you off at home on the way back.”

He thinks about it for a moment, then dips his head in a passive acquiescence, and for that moment, Furiosa is filled with the heady knowledge that she could get on her bike and take this man just about anywhere, and he would let her.

They slip out together, after a fair share of the dishes are done. Max has her stop by at his place before they hit the road in earnest, and comes back in a leather jacket. Even in the dark, she can read years of use in the thing, the kind that suggests that he maybe even used to ride. She determines to learn, eventually.

He slips back on behind her, puts his arms around her, and rumbles when he’s ready to go.

\---

She drives. She drives them faster than she had the night she’d rescued him to take him to the shop. Furiosa has roared along these roads for years, knows them like the veins in her own arms, the span of her good hand. Max rides quiet, holds tighter, and then yells, ones, a long and lovely whoop as they tear down one of the straightaways.

There isn’t much in terms of mountains near Citadel, but if you ride a half hour or so north you get some craggly formations that come close to being a kind of lookout. Furiosa takes them there, for lack of anywhere better to go, and parks them at the top of a little bluff. When she kills the lights and pulls off her helmet, she’s struck by how cool the air is, and how bright the stars are.

“Cold’s going to start to come in soon.” She informs Max, because she doesn’t know if he can taste this part of the world changing yet. “Nighttimes, at least. The days will stay hot, but you wouldn’t want to get stuck out here after dark.”

He answers her with his hands, one on her waist, the other a slow, firm drag up the inside of his thigh. Taken by surprise, Furiosa gasps, and the helmet slips gently from her grasp, to roll onto the sand. She feels him drop one foot onto the road to help the kickstand keep them steady, and finds herself arching, head tipping back for him.

“Yeah?” He checks, cautiously, with his hand resting a respectful distance down her thigh, but ready to slide higher the moment she says. She can feel desire coiled in him, whatever this week’s hesitancy was is gone, so she catches a deep breath, and nods, trusting he’ll feel it.

“If you’re ready.”

“I want to know what you’re like.” Max reaches up, and rests a hand between her legs, and the _heat_ of him, even through the denim, is staggering.   
She feels herself shift forwards, urgently, legs trying to close, to get more of that pressure, like she can trap him there. He reaches down, and pulls of her legs back open, as his hand lifts up, thumb drawing a circle around the button of her fly. She can feel him breathing, they’re so close. She feels the movement of his legs, as he shifts, the little gasp against the side of her throat.

“And this?” He wants to know again, a whisper against her skin, below her ear, and she feels herself gasp again, shifting to give him more of her throat. Her voice is ragged, but sure, somehow commanding, when she answers him;

“Yeah.”

He opens the button, deftly, and nudge the fly the rest of the way down, letting out a murmur of approval when she moans, and digs her heels in, rocking back against his chest. The arm that’s holding her slips around her ribs like a solid band, and she grabs onto it for purchase, with a short, urgent cry.

With her jeans still on, he can’t hardly move his hand at all, but manages enough to slide down, press two fingers so intimately between her legs that she growls at him. He holds her tighter in response, arm shifting so it rests up and flat between her breasts, hand gripping her shoulder, holding her pinned all the way back against his chest. It makes it harder to arch, to get where she wants him, and her hand grasps at his, clawing, until their fingers lace and she feels his mouth, the pressure of his teeth and his tongue against her pulse.

“There?” He checks, when he has her, and Furiosa goes rigid with each knowing flick of his fingertips, the rough pressure of his thumb.

“Harder,” she tells him, and feels him suck in an urgent breath, feels him press deeper inside her, even though he can only manage a bare inch. She feels him crush her closer. His mouth is on the tender hollow under her jaw, and the cool night breeze is so cold on her skin. She twists one knee up, writhes powerfully, and grabs his arm so tight with hers she fears she’ll leave bruises. Max laughs, and Furiosa crashes, collapses, gasping, boneless against his chest.

Max’s face is buried more firmly against her hair, now, and she feels him nuzzle the short stubble, shift his hand to withdraw. She makes a soft noise of complaint, and he goes immediately still, waiting like that for her to catch her breath. Slowly, he tells her, so softly that someone even a few feet away from them in the dark couldn’t stand a hope to hear,

“You know that you moaned my name when you saw my car?”

Furiosa smiles, wide and full of teeth, up at the sky, for a soaring second.

“Max?”

“Mm?”

“I normally don't condone revving as a practice, it isn't good for the engine,” and as she says this, so deliberately, so slowly, she feels the shift of his hand against her, “but I think you could reach past me for the ignition.”

This close to one another, she can actually feel the curve of his smile into her skin. He shifts her- he’s strong, she feels the ease of it for him, so that she’s pushed forward, so his hand is trapped between her and the bike, the tips of his fingers still pressed up inside her. If it hurts his wrist, he doesn’t say, and she doesn’t have time to ask. Her legs try to find purchase, but with his weight against her back she’s perfectly trapped. She feels her body ready itself for a fight, feels the breath he takes as he reaches past her, twists-

The roar of the engine, crushed through his hand, crushed through her, where she’s trapped between it and his weight, slams into her like a shock. She screams, and is cognizant of moving, as his bulk forces her further forward, until she feels metal on her cheek, until she feels herself shake away to almost nothing, a shred trapped between him and the machine.

\---

It’s a long while after he’s done with her before Furiosa feels ready to handle the bike safely enough to get them home. Max stays patiently still, while she sits a graceful sidesaddle and leans into his chest, fingertips tucked up under his jacket for warmth.

There is never any discussion of Max driving.


	8. and finally

Things are, for the next little while, mostly just pleasant and normal. Capable and Nux find time to sit and talk quietly, endlessly. Toast continues her education in political science, while working her two jobs. Cheedo’s film wraps up, leaving her at odds for a couple of weeks. Dag and Ms Brown are busy for hours a day in the garden.

Furiosa and Max steal time wherever they can. The coffee shop, as quiet as it used to be in the predawn hours, is now a bustling hub. Furiosa thinks longingly, often, of the days where it was just them in the dead silence together. In front of the other locals, they’re glassy eyed with one another, operating with only the barest apparent flickers of recognition, though Furiosa knows the news is out there, if only thanks to the racket she makes on her bike.

After his work, Max comes to see her in the garage, to do a little work on his car, or else to get her help with it. He’s the solitary type when it comes to mechanics, doesn’t normally ask for directions from anyone, but tolerates it from her. It works, because Furiosa never goes beyond the problem he offers her and instructs him on the next step. He prefers to figure that part out on his own, and just because she can see five moves down the line doesn’t mean he wants a lecture on it, or the adventure of finding his own way there spoiled.

Once, she leans in over his shoulder, rests a hand on the nape of his neck, and points out;

“Firehazard.” Enough to make him pause, and re-evaluate where he’s putting that particular wire, but that’s the total extent of her interventionalism.

They didn’t fuck out on the motorcycle. More specifically, Max’s pants stayed all the way on, erection ignored. She hadn’t specifically intended it in advance, but she doesn’t regret it, and she can tell that he doesn’t, either. She likes that she has this window, now, where he watches her so hungrily, where he casually, eagerly continues to put himself into her hands. 

Max doesn’t do the touch thing so much, she’s come to realize. _She_ has the girls, with their easy hugs and expressive movements, and Ms Brown, who likes to rest a hand between Furiosa’s shoulders when she’s telling her something she wants to stick. Max has Nux, who is too intimidated by him to step too close, and a tendency to recoil when strangers make the mistake of stepping too close, who looks ready to flip the town’s little old priest into the flower bushes out of surprise when the man emerges suddenly into his field of vision, taking his hands to grip, to shake. The priest gives him earnest exaltations about how nice it is to have more young men joining their community, while Max nods, twitchily, and waits until it’s polite to extricate himself from the situation.

Later, lounging in the in the coffee shop, three quarters of the way through his newspaper, Furiosa thinks of that moment and glances up. 

Max is on a chair, with a cleaning cloth, getting the dust off the tops of the blades of the ceiling fan, and for a rare, brief window, the place is theirs alone. She slips out of her chair, waits until she knows he sees her, then slips in close to his side, hooking two fingers into one of his beltloops. Max snorts, and gives the fan a spin, reaching for the next blade, and Furiosa takes advantage of the open stretch of his side, the taut pull of cotton over his skin, to lean in and give that very vulnerable spot just below the rib cage, a short, quick, bite.

He _groans_ , honest to goodness, and reaches down to put a hand against the back of her head, steadying himself suddenly against the ceiling fan, and she waits until she’s sure he’s got his balance, before sliding out and away from him, folding his newspaper back up and setting it on the counter, and sauntering her way out the door.

\---

Capable’s first night in her piano bar turns into enough of an affair that they need to take two cars. Ms Brown drives the Mazda with Capable and Nux, and Furiosa piles Toast, Dag and Cheedo in with her, and then swings by to pick up Max. They pull up at his house, and Cheedo, who had been in the front, slips out without needing to be asked and climbs into the back.

Max takes her place passenger-side, and buckles himself in as Furiosa pulls them out and takes them out towards the highway. The girls are expectantly silent, for a moment, adjusting to their quiet- the only real greeting Max and Furiosa make, after all, is as she catches his eyes while facing him, making a right hand turn onto the next road.

Toast caves. Bubbles;

“You’ve got all of us because Ms Brown is giving Nux some kind of shovel talk.”

“Shovel talk?” Prompts Max, with perfect surprise, though Furiosa can tell he know perfectly well what Toast means, but that she wants to be asked.

“You know. ‘You hurt our Capable, we’ll bury you in the back yard with a shovel, for the mole crickets to eat.’”

“Stop _talking_ about that,” says Cheedo, who wasn’t even there, but heard the whole story and has a tender sort of heart, and apparently a rather weak stomach.

“Well,” Max says, at length, “’be good for him. He’s going to get it more than once.”

“And he might as well get the _rough_ one out of the way first.” Furiosa agrees with that he’s left unsaid, to agreement from the back. Ms Brown is a sweet, kindly, smiling woman, and Furiosa is absolutely convinced she has a body or two buried at least somewhere on her property.

“Poor Nux,” says Cheedo, reaching up and touching her fingertips to the glass pane, watching the sunset go by outside.

“Poor Capable,” corrects Dag, because that’s got to be worse, in her opinion, simultaneously nerve wracking and mortifying.

Toast just grin, and leans forward in her chair. She has the middle seat, so this puts her squarely between the two of them. Furiosa is interested to see that Toast’s presence doesn’t set off Max’s startle reflex the same way the priest has, but he does seem very alert, to have her so nearby;

“You know you’re in for it next, Max. Only they won’t send Ms Brown for you.” From the back, Cheedo actually crows as she decides she agrees, and Furiosa feels her eyebrows arch. Toast continues; “You know her. So probably, you’re going to get a visit from one of the other sisters.”

Max thinks she’s kidding. Honestly, Toast probably halfway thinks she’s kidding. Furiosa looks over at them, and watches that look melt off Max’s face, as he sees her and sees that yes, that is an awkwardness that might actually happen to him.

“You’ll do fine.” Furiosa decides. 

Now Dag and Cheedo are both grinning, as well, as Max sits back in his seat, looking at the road ahead.

“We’ll protect you.” Dag promises, loyally. “Furiosa’s biker family won’turn you into dogmeat on our watch.”

Furiosa takes a curve, thinking privately that if the Vuvalini wanted something there was no way in _hell_ these kids would get in their way, but she’s kind enough not to say it. For their sakes, not for Max, who reads it clearly in her face.

“His intentions are honourable,” Cheedo decides, settling back in her chair, like that settles it, it’ll be fine.

“Not _that_ honourable,” Dag contradicts, with one of her crowing laughs.

“That’s enough.” Furiosa decides, and not just because they’re coming up on the parking lot and Ms Brown, who if she joins in on this drift will make everything infinitely worse. “We’re here. Gear yourselves up to go back to torturing Capable.”

An obedient, if still mirthful, silence falls in the back, until they’re in, parked, and the girls can pour out. Max looks like he’s on the verge of asking if he’s really going to end up toe to toe with a lesbian biker, but seems to decide her answer won’t help. Instead, he crosses to the back of the car, where he waits for her to catch up, and then, tentatively, puts one of his arms around her waist.

“This all right?”

He checks, even as his arm tightens, just a touch, and she feels herself smiling. It marks them as a _them,_ in public, in front of everyone, and he has a way of asking for permission when others might not think that it mattered.

“Sure.” Shifting a little closer, so they can walk in together like that. “It’s a good idea. It’ll make it harder for our lesbian snipers to get you with a clean hit.”

He murmurs one of his wordless agreements, and walks her into the bar.

The show isn’t much of a show. People murmur through it, it isn’t really billed as an event, more a way to pass a Tuesday, so a few of the regulars talk loudly. But Capable is lovely and they’re all proud of her, especially Nux. Nux thinks she’s the one who hung the moon in the sky on a normal day, so seeing her play piano, the kid is beyond smitten.

It’s a good night. They get nachos to share, the girls get beer, Ms Brown gets whiskey and Furiosa and Max drink water.

“Greenham Commons,” Ms Brown is telling the girls, “was a military base in the UK where someone decided it’d be a fine idea to store US bombs, nuclear weaponry, back in the seventies. So, the CND decided to stage a march- none of these pitiful one day affaires, this lasted three days? Four? A pilgrimage down to the base. When we got there, we set up camp in a circle ‘round the fence, which was several miles long. Everyone held up mirrors, to reflect the base back in on itself, ‘an to surround it with positive, female energy.”

“Female?” Dag clarifies, a little more consistently unused to this kind of language than the others, by now.

“Sure. The camp- we stayed there for years, you know- was all women. The base was this big circle, and had a number of gates that we named, green gate, blue gate- some of the gates men were allowed to visit in the day time to see their wives and girlfriends, but others were women only, all the time. Overnight, no men were allowed.”

Dag shoots an uncertain glance at Max, who seems, as always, unfazed and unperturbed by this particular brand of feminism. His non-reaction goes a long way with Ms Brown, Furiosa expects.

“Back then, you see, the world was a different place. You all are too young to remember it, and Max and Furiosa would just have been little kids, but there was a feeling, a real feeling, that the world could end at any minute, that a nuclear holocaust was an inevitability if good people didn’t get up and take a stand. It led to actions like you wouldn’t believe, actions like I haven’t seen the like of since. There were hundreds of us, and many camped at the Commons for years. There were women who stayed so long, babies were born there, delivered under the shelter of tarps into the arms of midwives, that’s how entrenched we were.”

“What did you camp in?” Toast wants to know. “Tents?”

“Nah. The base, it paid people to come out and trash anything they could get their hands on. We had tarps, and we’d string them up to the sides of trees and make lean-tos. We had campfires, we sometimes had _a_ pot, though a lot of those got stolen. You’d keep a cup and a spoon on you, and wash them when you were done in the nearby ponds. Bathed in those, too, though that was a hell of its’ own- the soldiers would come out and yell things I’d never heard the like of, would try to take pictures.”

Cheedo frowns in concern, and Furiosa leans back. This is lore she’s grown up on, so she listens with only one ear, watching the rest of the bar go by. The girls are getting a few looks, of course, they’re young and pretty, but no one looks like they’re anywhere near doing anything serious about it. Furiosa gives one guy a quick, piercing look when he makes eyecontact, a subtle ‘back the hell off,’ that he takes with good grace, turning back to his drink.

“So that night we broke into the compound and stole a jeep.” Ms Brown is saying, and the laughter draws her back to their table. Even Max is chuckling now, surprised into engaging by the lively, wily story. “This militant woman, a little more hardcore than the rest of us, Leslie- love of my life, Leslie was- she knew how to hotwire a car. We used wirecutters to get through the fence, boosted the thing, then didn’t know what to do with it. We just started blaring the horn and screaming around in circles, until we were surrounded in a circle of floodlights and gun barrels.”

“Oh my _god,_ ” says Toast, “I can’t believe nuclear security was that _bad.”_

“Well, that was the point, love. If we could get in there, with little to no training- all ‘cept Leslie, of course, then how safe was it to have the bloody things to begin with?”

“So, what happened?” Dag pushes, wanting the resolution to the story. Furiosa knows that the answer to that was complicated, that momentum had died down over the years, but eventually the base _had_ de-armed, and that the action had been part of a crush that had put real pressure on governments to seriously consider global responsibility and the insanity of the cold war-

“World hasn’t ended yet,” Ms Brown explains, much more succinctly than Furiosa could have, “so, I’m guessing we did something right, didn’t we?”

\---

Max goes to get another round of beer, later. Ms Brown is explaining the Mists of Avalon, to her curious circle of onlookers- even Nux has snapped back in to the conversation for this- but Furiosa has read it, so watches Max instead. He negotiates his careful way to the end of the bar that’s least crowded, and talks to the barkeep with his fingers, holding up four, holding up two, as he places their order. The bartender asks him something, and he nods. The man starts filling a pitcher.

She approves of the cautious way Max waits, one arm on the wood, of the way he watches the barkeeper’s hands, even as he digs into his back pocket for his wallet. 

The barkeeper says something else to him, as he sets the pitcher down on the bartop, and Max frowns, and doesn’t answer. The man is pouring water now, oblivious to the growing look of irritation on Max’s face. Furiosa can’t read what they’re talking about, but does get to the see the moment where the guy looks up and sees that whatever he’s saying _isn’t_ getting traction. He looks awfully glad for the big wooden bar between them, right about now. From the guilty glance the man directs at their table, she can make a pretty educated guess at who he was talking about.

She turns back to table, and only looks at Max when he sinks back down next to her, putting the beer in the centre of the table, putting her water glass in front of her.

“I’m paying you back for that,” she informs him, knee brushing his underneath the table.

“I’d let you,” Max answers, with his usual equanimity, as he puts an arm around the back of her chair, just for a moment, “but it turned out to be on the house.”

Ms Brown murmurs approvingly into her whiskey, as Capable finishes up the set.

\---

Without a word on the subject, they drop the girls off first on the way back, pulling up out front so they can pile out and into the house.

“I can drive you home,” Furiosa offers, “or we can pull up the lane, and park behind my place.”

Max seems to consider it, and she gives him his time to. In the silence of the car, her breathing is deep and steady, and she finds it’s in time with his.

“Please,” he says, and nods up at her house. She smiles, and makes the turn into the drive.

\---

It can’t quite be said that they spend the first hour talking, because they’re still so quiet around one another, even like this. Especially, maybe, now that they’ve spent the evening surrounded by the crushing sound in the bar. Furiosa pours them both a bit of her bourbon, and they go up to her bedroom, leave their boots strewn on the floor.

Max lies on his back, with the glass balanced on his solar plexus, one hand near it, the other splayed on the bed next to her. Furiosa lies beside him, on her side, further down the bed, so that her forehead is near his fingertips, so that when the mood takes him he can reach out and brush his fingers across her skin.

He does it now, thumb stroking along the furrow between her brows. She sighs, and relaxes her expression, giving up turning the day’s worries over and over in her mind.

“Is it Splendid?”

Him knowing the name doesn’t startle her, though hearing it now sort of does. She looks up at him, and wonders which of the other girls told him, and how much. Instead of asking, she nods. He looks back up at the ceiling.

“I’ve been there.”

Furiosa believes that, unquestioningly. She shifts closer on the bed, so the backs of her knuckles brush the outside of his knee.

Max is quiet for a long, long few moments, before he comes out and says it.

“I want- to know about you, but I.”

But he’s not ready to talk. Furiosa looks up at him, and points out;

“I can’t think of an important thing about me that you don’t know already, Max.”

“I know.” And his hand smoothes over her hair again. Still, he communicates, with carefully searching fingertips. Furiosa, who doesn’t know _how_ to give a biography any more, would be fucked at a high school reunion, if she’d went to a highschool to begin with, turns to kiss his palm, to communicate her willingness.

“I was homeschooled over here. Life on a bike wasn’t for me, the whole thing, when I was fourteen. I moved Canada to be near my father, picked up the accent in a hurry. He and I didn’t get along.”

Max sits up, sipping his drink, finishing the last swallow, before setting it on the nightstand and turning back to her. He listens, so intently she can nearly feel him resonating.

“I picked up my highschool equivalency, and then went to university there for a couple of years. I worked in garages in lived on my own, mostly in places with rats the size of small dogs.”

He takes her drink, too, and gently sets that out of the way, before slipping down the bed a little. Her eyes close as his hand splays against her hip.

“I quit before I got anywhere with it. Then, trade school in the States, and work there for about ten years. I got the call that mum was sick, and it brought me back to Melbourne and onto the road.”

Max has shifted now, so that he’s slid down the bed towards her, on his side as well, so they’re face to face. She could reach out for him, easily.

“Why’d you leave them?” The question startles her, and she doesn’t catch the meaning at first, until he clarifies. “Your separatist lesbian bikers.”

“Oh.” The answer to that has to do with her mother’s death, and with stability. It has to do with second wave feminism and some of the big problems with it, deep seated issues that she isn't graceful enough to articulate or sure of enough to get into with him, here, in her bed. She loves the womyn, and has profound respect for them, but there are things there that are too uncomfortable for her to form as thoughts. Then, of course, there are the things that violence does to you, in the long run. But she clears her throat, and says, instead; “Heterosexuality, for one thing.”

That makes him smile, and reach for her properly, and pull her overtop of him. She helps, shifting into an easy straddle of his hips, settling there like that, before beginning the ritual process of taking off her arm.

“Tell me what I need to know about your leg,” she instructs him, because even if he isn’t necessarily ready for the rest, that’s important, that’s something they can’t mess around with. She watches his mouth curve with frustration, even as his thumbs draw circles on her hips.

“It’s fine. Nine times out of ten, it’s fine.”

“So if you say stop, we stop,” she agrees, as she sets her prosthesis gently down, then in one fluid movement grabs the bottom of her tank top, and yanks the thing up over her head. “That’d be true anyways.”

Back on the bike, pressed together frantically, had been very different from this. They hadn’t even been able, or necessarily ready for that matter, to look at each other, there. Now, he sees the expanse of her skin in the soft light of her bedside lamp. That she is made of pure sinew, and has scars from old road rash, from other things, and wants him, just devastatingly.

She slips to the side, cautiously, so they can both undress. So he can take his brace down with the same ritual, careful movements as she’d used to take off the arm. He toes off his socks. She helps him get his jeans down.

Naked together for the first time is the closest she’s ever felt to any sort of awkwardness with him, but it doesn’t last long. She touches his thigh, the leg he has trouble with, then his hip, then trails her hand along his stomach, before carefully reaching down and grasping his cock. Max goes still, then his head slips back against the sheets and she feels him shiver, feels him begin to grow firm in her hand. Furiosa squeezes, and feels him gasp.

Max is still more comfortable giving than receiving, so she lets him roll her onto her back, and hums a low approval as he shifts lower, telegraphing his intentions with long kisses, with an inexorable slide down. 

Honest, she admits to herself that she’s wanted this one particular thing from him since she saw him standing in the shop window.

Max doesn’t glance up, and she winds the fingers of her hand into his hair, gasping again as his tongue touches against her.

He eats her out until her legs are shaking, until she puts a knee in his shoulder reflexively to try to shove away from the pure overstimulation of it, and then he does it all over again, patiently parting her legs again, and pushing her right over another precipice. She bucks and fights, so he pins her down, and even then her shoulders and back still arch such that she eventually thrashes her topsheet loose. In the end, she gives him another, more decisive kick out of her, and uses her knee to pivot him, put him onto his back, where he lays for her, shivering.

Furiosa climbs astride him, and then waits, takes him by the jaw and waits until she sees sense in his eyes, waits for his nod.

“Please, yes,” he says, and so she reaches for the nightstand, where she keeps the condoms.

When she takes him inside her, Furiosa feels as though she possesses him, and understands some of the hot, angry protectiveness that comes hand in hand, for some people, with love. He rests his forehead against her collarbone, holds her by the hips, and is so sweet for her, gasping and clutching as she shows him the rhythm she likes with the press of her nails into the nape of his neck.

\---

The sky is turning pink at the horizon by the time they finally succumb to exhaustion. The night is too hot and close, her room too stuffy, and they’re both too covered in sweat to fall asleep touching more than just the tips of their fingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hesitated on writing this chapter this way, because (you may have noticed) we're about the fandom with the highest cunnilingus rate per capita on the internet. Then I decided that to hell with it, that was a standard I was happy to help hold up.
> 
> Additionally, I wanted to say thank you again for the reviews yesterday- they were a hilarious mix of 'hot sex' and 'oh god I googled that and WHY MAX WHY' which is exactly what I was hoping for, for our man Max whose first act in his own film is to eat the head off a raw lizard. Your comments are loved and adored.
> 
> Last little thing; I know it can be hard to tell in fic some time, but I wanted to put it down for the record that the stories about Greenham Common are taken almost 100% out of transcripts of the events from women who were there. The safehouse network is not fictional either, the structure there is based off stories from a woman I know who served in Furiosa's role, only in the UK. It all seems fantastical sometimes, but I wanted this to be a very true, very 'real life' AU, because of the bedazzlement and sorcery of the original. The extraordinary things they do here are all real.


	9. please leave a message

The summer has, for the most part, been lovely already, but the next few weeks are something to be remembered. It’s good news all around; Ms Brown’s and Dag’s vegetables come in bountifully, Toast’s political science course is going well, while Cheedo gets hired on to another film, putting her squarely in the realm of having a _career_ in this, and Capable and Nux carry along blessedly contentedly.

It’s a good thing, too, because Furiosa and Max fall into one another with such a ferocity that it’s a little all consuming. Even if none of the rest of that were true, they probably wouldn’t have been much good to the world anyways.

A few things happen that are of note;

First, they discuss it. Her tubes being tied and his having a vasectomy, plus now barrier protection, probably represents some degree of birth control overkill. If they both feel the same in a few months time they’ll go to a clinic, get tested, and assess their options from there.

Second, much more excitingly, Max finishes the work on the loom. It leaves just a few small tweaks needed, but he expects her to be road ready in a few days, if everything from here is smooth sailing. He has a few more parts to pick up at the post office, under his name this time, little things like dial plates, a headlight, but still a town over, so she gives him a ride on the back of her bike again. 

It’s hard not to think about the last time they rode out on this together, and by the time they get back to his place, they scramble up the front steps like teenagers. She kicks her pants off, yanks his down to her knees, and he fucks her standing up against the Miller’s front door. The front hall mirror is right behind him, and she can see the ripple of his back as he holds her up, with her ankles locked tight around his back and her arm around his neck. Each thrust sends an expressive curl through the small of his back, and she tries to watch for as long as she can.

Which brings her to the third thing; she sees the inside of Max’s house. 

It’s still the Miller’s house, for all intents and purposes. They left it furnished, and rent it to him for a pittance, so long as he takes care of the upkeep. Everything looks like it was purchased in the 1960s, and there’s an awful lot of wood paneling and faded salmon coloured upholstery. Furiosa has never seen anyone less at home in their house in her entire life. The only exception might be the kitchen, where the coffee maker is new, and bowls of fresh fruit and vegetables adorn the table, and counters.

All in all, she can’t say there are many times in her life she’s been happier.

\---

They’re at her shop. Max is just screwing that new headlight in. Furiosa is on the creeper underneath a stalled VW, and is a little focused, since she doesn’t see many of these in these parts. The phone in the office begins to ring.

On the third chime, Max asks;

“You ever get that?”

Ring.

“Sometimes.”

“Cause what’s the point of having it if you don’t pick it up?”

Ring.

“You haven’t lived in the country long enough.” She informs him, because within a few more weeks he’ll figure it out. The machine gets it, and Splendid chimes;

“Hello, you’ve reached the voicemail of Citadel Garage, open Monday to Friday, eight am to four pm. Please leave a message with your name and phone number and we’ll be sure to return your call.”

“Well.” Says the voice, in a drawl that sends a crawl down Furiosa’s spine. She drags herself out from under the car in a swift movement, and feels Max tense behind her. “If you didn’t want us to know it was you that hid her, you ought to have taken the bitch off your answering machine.”

Furiosa lunges for the office, sending the creeper skittering, but the call is already disconnected. She’s already grabbing the phone, punching with numb fingertips at the numbers to call the asshole back, when Max catches up to her and the heel of his palm slams down against the receiver, sending the line dead in her ear.

“I’m not saying don’t do it.” He tells her, quiet, only a little out of breath. “But it sounds to me like the kind of thing you want to think about before you do.”

His hand withdraws, leaving her with a dial tone in her ear and a feeling of thwarted fury in the pit of her stomach, because he’s right, he’s right. She slams the phone back down on the hook, and does her level best not to scream. Instead, she kicks out at the filing cabinet, short and hard and satisfying.

Max has taken the phone up, has a paper and pen, and seems to be noting details down. Sensible things, like the number that called them, the exact wording of the message, and the time the call was placed. Cop, she remembers, right.

Still, she slams the filing cabinet with her boot again, and storms away to find the key for it. It’s in the top of the desk, which is locked, so she goes to the wall for the key to that, gets it, and then goes to unlock the filing cabinet and slams open the bottom drawer, and pulls out the sawed off shotgun that lives in there.

“Furiosa.”

Right, Max, who seems to be better grasping how bad is bad, in this case, or else just is worried about the fact that she suddenly looks dead calm and has a definitely illicit looking gun in her hand. She moves back to the desk, and stores it in the hooks she has under the thing, for exactly that purpose, which seems to take Max’s worry down a very slight notch.

“I’ve got to get to Ms Brown’s.” She informs him, looking at the two sets of keys, and setting the bigger one down on the desk. “Can you lock up here?”

Max rips the top sheet of paper off the pad without a word, and holds it out to her, arm outstretched. She nods, and grabs it from him on the way out the door, leaving him to shut the place down for the day behind her.

(Here’s the god’s honest truth of it; she likes him, but she isn’t a damsel, and what’s going on here has nothing to do with him.)

\---

Ms Brown listens, calm and collected, while Dag pokes around the garden and weeds. She calls Valkyrie, and leaves her a message asking her to please call back as soon as she can. They sit in the kitchen together, and watch Dag work, until there comes a knock on the front door.

While she’d normally yell ‘it’s open,’ today the old woman gets to her feet and goes to see who it is.

She comes back to the kitchen with Max in tow, and Furiosa lets out a breath. He lifts his hand, and jangles her keys at her, because she’s going to need those to get in tomorrow. She holds out her hand to him, palm up, and he drops the ring into her hand.

“What does he know?” Ms Brown asks, flatly, breaking the silence.

“Nothing.” Max answers for her, after a few seconds of lapsing silence. He’s just here, apparently, to let her know; “Car’s done. If you need to let off a little steam.”

She nods, and pockets the keys, seriously considers it, but says instead.

“I think I’ve got to talk to the girls tonight.”

“I’ll do that.” Ms Brown interjects, and when Furiosa starts to complain, cuts her off, hard. “You’ve got a face like a thundercloud right now, woman, and you’re moving like the grim reaper. You’ll scare the daylights out of them. Let this nice young man drive you around in his car, it’ll do you a world of good.”

She’s right. Furiosa goes out with him, breathing carefully, feeling like she’s going to burst at any moment. He’s wise enough not to try to touch her, to let her make it down into his car, into the passengers seat. He slips into the driver side, and pulls them out of the way without a word.

\--

 

“Drive your fastest,” Furiosa says, when the sun is low, and he’s eaten up a hundred klicks of road with his wheels, when the way he drives has eased her down just far enough that she can get words out at all.

Max, a police academy, precision driver if she ever met one, takes them into a skid at a speed that makes her want to scream, and then when the nose is pointed in the full other direction takes them off again, roaring down the road.

She lets herself lean back in her seat and breathe out the massive gasp she’d swallowed, and starts to feel human again.

Max drives them back to her place, and parks in the lane up near her house, then shows her where he keeps the pistol in the dash, just in case, and the slightly larger revolver, under a mat, in the floorboards.

When he talks, he asks,

“What do you need from me?”

She glances over at him, and tries to decide, weighing him.

“It’s your turn to talk,” she says.

He turns back to look out at the window. When it pours out of him, it comes so slowly, she can practically taste the blood in every single word.

\---

There was a job, he says. 

“A thing with a gang. Gear heads.”

He doesn’t get more than that out, except.

“Broke my leg. Ran it right over. There were-” the kind of pause that for him is agony, “-other parts.”

She makes a cutting gesture with his hand, severing that road. He doesn’t need to. He looks at her with shaken, wild-eyed relief.

“I couldn’t sleep for a while. Came into some violence.”

Tactful understatement, she feels. She can feel him trying, straining, through something, and she knows all at once that if he keeps pushing, something is going to break. Not the kind of thing she wants broken. He’ll do it if she asks him to, but she doesn’t need to think hard to see that she doesn’t want to ask.

“That’s all I need.” She answers, breathes in, and out, and watches him. He’s white faced, and his eyes are glassy. “Max.”

Nothing.

_“Max.”_

Now he turns, and looks her in the eye again, snapping back to from wherever he just went.

“You’re good. It’s me.” She waits until he _sees_ her, before she gently prompts; “Drive us home.”

He takes her to her place, and crawls into her bed without protest, sleeping with his head resting atop her chest, an arm tucked about her waist.

She lies in the dark and considers whether or not this is a man that one more knock down, drag out gunfight might destroy beyond repair.

\---

“I can’t.” Says Cheedo, sitting at the dining room table, looking at Furiosa apologetically, begging her to understand. “I can’t, I can’t-”

“We don’t want you to, sweetheart,” Ms Brown interjects, folding her hands in her own. They’re all clustered around the dining room table together, talking the thing through. Valkyrie had called back with no news but the advice to get everyone out for now, just in case. While Furiosa herself isn’t prepared to pull up stakes at the drop of a hat, she can at least move the girls out of harms way.

“We don’t,” Furiosa agrees, “we were hoping that you would move into town closer to your new set. At least for a while. Maybe even permanently, if it works out for you. This place is a stepping stone, Cheedo, and it isn’t meant to be somewhere that drags you back into violence.”

“I’ll go with you,” says Toast, soothingly, when Cheedo starts to cry. There’s no way she’ll be able to make it on her own just yet. Furiosa shoots Toast a look that is impossibly grateful. “I’ll be able to stay with you a few nights of the week at least, maybe visit back here once in a while- there’s more work to be had closer to the city. We can be roommates, split rent.”

And when Cheedo folds into her chest, wracked with tears, Toast puts her arms around her, tenderly. Furiosa lets out a breath of relief, and turns to Dag and Capable. Both look determined as hell, but Capable caves, with a rush of her own tears.

“I can’t. I’m so sorry, I didn’t-”

“No.” Furiosa says, getting to her feet, going to the kitchen counter for a box of tissues, which she brings back. Apparently they’re all going to need it tonight.

“No, I mean, I didn’t want to tell you this way, but I’m pregnant. Nux and I are pregnant.”

She feels her heart just about stop in her chest. 

“It’s only the first month, so I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure she was going to be okay, but if there’s any chance of trouble here, I...”

A _baby._ Furiosa is completely flabbergasted. They've only possibly been sleeping together for five months now? It only takes once, she supposes, but still, how could this be happening again? Ms Brown hurries to save the situation.

“Lovey, congratulations. Look at you. She’ll take for sure, if the time is right. Of course you shouldn’t stay here.”

“I’ll ask Nux if I can stay with him.” Capable offers, dabbing at her eyes with the handkerchief. “That way I’ll be close, in case you need anything.”

“But you’re to stay away from the shop. All of you. Even if you visit. The only thing we know that he has is my work address, and that means I don’t want a single one of you turning up there.”

Furiosa levels a glare around the table, provoking mute nods from everyone, with various degrees of mutiny. All except Dag, whose lips are pressed into a thin, tight line. Dag still hasn’t said a word yet. It becomes increasingly obvious as the silence stretches on. She’s breathing hard, through her nose, and has red splotches on her pale chest. The cast came off this morning, and her arm is braced on the table. Furiosa can see the line where the skin is ever so slightly lighter, below the elbow.

“Look.” Dag snaps in the end. “I respect the hell out of you, I’ll leave, but on account of your orders, not because of another fucking guy, right?”

She looks livid, and bright eyed, and Furiosa thinks that of all of them, Dag may be the one who one day ends up out there on a bike.

“No one’s giving orders, Dag.” Ms Brown says, responding, Furiosa thinks, to the same thing she sees. That’s one of the things you learn as well; when a girl wants a chance to fight, never tell her no. “I’m moving in here too. The three of us together, we’ll be the best bet for it.”

Toast looks like she wants to retract her offer to leave, badly, but Cheedo clings to her a little tighter, and she succumbs, with a reassuring murmur into the other girl’s hair.

“I’ll make Max teach me how to shoot.” Dag reasons, like that is that. “And if this bastard tries to come near Furiosa, we kill him.” 

\---

Max comes by the next afternoon, ostensibly to help load a few boxes, but Furiosa takes him aside right away and explains what she hadn’t wanted to admit in the coffee shop, around the morning commuters, that Dag wants to stay behind, and that she needs a shooting lesson.

“Sure,” says Max, “want me to go get something?”

“Ms Brown’s bringing a few things over.” She reassures him, with a shake of her head. “She’s moving in until this is all resolved.”

With the other three out, and with the worst of the shock of it behind her, Furiosa feels much better. Max is still being careful not to startle her, not to confine her with his body or his hands, so she goes to him, slips an arm around his waist, and rests herself up against him, forehead dropping onto his shoulder. His arms slip right around her in return.

“Do I owe you an apology for the last couple of days?” Furiosa asks, muffled, feeling the rest of the tension roll off her shoulders. At some point the scent of him has become familiar. She feels him shake his head, and then the press of his lips against her temple.

She’s not so sure, but she’ll take it.

Max is a good shot. Dag is an okay one, but gets better as he works with her. She’s a little excitable, though. So much so that he holds the gun whenever Furiosa goes out into their makeshift range to prop the cans back up for her. Max corrects her stance with cool practice, tells her when to breathe, how to go slower, and then how to go faster when she needs to.

“This is amazing, Furiosa!” Dag crows, and Max grabs at her gun hand, mid gesticulation, gritting his teeth. She makes an apologetic sound, surrendering it to him, before pulling her ear protection off with both hands and insisting; “You have to try.”

And then, it occurs to Furiosa that Dag is offering this, and has asked for the lesson from Max, because she assumes that Furiosa has no real idea how to use a gun. Max, for that matter, is holding it out to her, expectantly.

She takes the gun from him, and looks out at the field. Of the seven cans she’d set up, Dag has knocked down the middle most two this last time, each within three shots.

Furiosa checks the bullets in the gun, squares her stance just how she likes it, and shoots five times, in just under three second. Dag howls in triumph and surprise, as the every single one of the cans just goes.

She turns to look at Max, who says, very levelly;

“Dag, we’re going to be out here a little while. Why don’t you see if the girls need any more help with packing the car?”

Furiosa reloads the gun, and Dag, who can take a hint, runs for the house.

\---

Max has a tiny bit too much formal training to play with the guns in any real way, but likes that she’s a better shot than him and stands so close behind her that she periodically feels him twitch when her ejected casings clip him. 

She’s still too tangled up to take him to her bed, but pushes him back against one of the trees and kisses him, for a good long time, and until her shoulders are a little looser, and the anxiety is a little less of a knot in her chest.

It’s the first night they sleep in one another’s beds without the sex.

“I feel twisted up about you,” she tells him, in the very quiet. He hums an agreement. He knows.

A little while later, when she isn’t quite sleeping, he admits;

“I feel like I’m lying without meaning to.” She hears what he means, hears the things he’s not saying. Unconcerned, and drowsy, she admits;

“If it helps, I had someone break in and check your service papers?”

“Guessed that,” Max answers, leaning over and kissing the nape of her neck. “Not what I mean.”

Furiosa grins into the pillow, and shifts back so they’re just that much closer.

“Go to sleep, Max.”

He sighs, deeply, and does as she suggests.

\---

Valkyrie isn’t getting anywhere. They’re still stuck hunting the People Eater and Organic Mechanic, his suspected accomplice, and neither of whom are anywhere on anyone’s radar. There are some police reports, sure, but aside from the traffic ticket it’s all old stuff, in different parts of the country entirely. No one close to the ground has any news on a missing pregnant woman, or even on how the two prefer to dispose of their victims.

What they do know is that Joe has a history of settling grudges, and that the voicemail he left is one they should take as a credible threat. Not an explicit one, of course, not nearly enough to call the police and have him put back in jail for his last couple of months, but they’re going to continue to take precautions.

Just in case.


	10. the real world works

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> WARNING. This chapter contains more graphic violence than the rest of the story, and contains two characters assaulting another, using misogynistic and homophobic language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I set out to plan this story, this chapter is the only thing that is radically different to me from what my original vision had been. I think I've rewritten it a handful of times now, in something like three different directions, and although this one is the most bittersweet, it is the truest and by far my favourite. I hope you understand what I mean when I read it.

It all happens faster, than any of them predicted or imagined. For all their preparations and for all their shooting lessons and moving houses, ultimately there’s nothing she can do to stop it. Real life isn’t ever a showdown at the OK Corral. The next day, at the end of her shift, two men are waiting for her on her way out of the shop. They wait until she’s locking the door, then slam into her from behind, and there isn’t a thing she can do to stop it. She smashes, cheek first, into the wood. Another hit winds her, punches the air right out of her lungs, and when the first one spins her around, the second one knees her in the gut, so hard that she retches.

The mantra is the same as it’s been the first day she looked herself in the mirror and shore down her curls and her perceived femininity with it. _Dyke bitch,_ and then _whore,_ and _cunt,_ which have both been around since long before the haircut. They punch, and grab, and they spit at her.

Furiosa dislocates the first bastard’s shoulder when she finally gets a grip and throws him, but the second guy has her by the prosthesis, and drags it so hard she stumbles, jerked by the straps. She doesn’t even have time to fully register the knife in his hand before she lashes out at his wrist in desperation. It goes skittering. He backhands her for that, then punches her, short and sharp, and she feels the back of her head slam against the shop wall again, lights flaring in front of her vision. 

When she can see again, his hands are around her throat, choking her, because he’s angry she’s fighting back, angry for his humiliated friend. Now that the shock of the attack has worn off it’s easy break his thumb, then two fingers on the other hand for luck.

Fucking amateurs. His friend has already gone, and he spooks too when he hears his own bones snap and splinter. She should chase him, try to drop him, but all she can do is stagger back against the shop door and leave him to run.

They make it to their car, but she has sweat and blood in her eyes and can’t make out the plate. Not that it’d be likely to do any good anyways.

She wipes their spit off her face, doubles over, sickened. Furiosa draws herself up straight, walks with her shoulders back and her head high to where her keys fell, then lets herself into the shop. She reaches first for the sawed off, under the table, and holds it against her chest. Something has malfunctioned in the gears of her prosthesis, and the restriction of the leather around her bruised chest is making her feel sick, and making it hard to breathe. She sets the gun on the desk and gets the thing off, with only a little clawing as the pieces stick, as her shaky hand struggles on the tighter buckles.

This isn’t a world where she has to fight so often that she is impervious to going into shock. As soon as the arm is off her, though, she can breathe a little easier. Did she remember to lock the door behind her? There’s no time to check.

Furiosa takes the gun with her as far as the phone, then sets it down again, snatching the receiver up and cradling it against her ear while she dials. The adrenaline has started giving her the shakes, so it takes three tries to dial what turns out to be, in the end, the only number she can think of.

“Hello?” Says Max, who comes from the city and still has a cellphone that he even answers.

“Come pick me up.” Furiosa orders, voice steady as stone. “It happened. I’m at work. Bring a first aid kit.”

Max hangs up before she does.

By the time he makes it to her, she’s sitting down on the floor behind her desk, coming to terms with the fact that she may be concussed, shotgun resting over her knees. He raps on her door, then pounds, and she gets to her feet, forcing herself to walk unsteadily to the door, which she did lock, after all.

When she opens it up, Max has already stepped back out into the yard, is circling to one of the garage doors, ready to try to lift that open, but he turns back at the sound of the bell and freezes at the sight of her.

To reach out to him, she’d have to surrender her death grip on the shot gun, so she waits for him to come to her, to slip a hand around her waist, for the careful support as he walks her gently down to the car.

\---

At Max’s house, he sits her up on a kitchen chair, and starts by cleaning the blood off her cheek and scalp. Furiosa tips her head to and fro as his fingers move her. She’s lost a whole nail, torn out right from the root, and has no memory of how or on who. 

When she blocked the man with the knife, he got her under the collarbone, apparently- probably the same time the prosthesis was damaged, and Max peels her bloody top off and gives her six neat little stitches.

“Pretty fucking lucky,” she declares, acerbically, because even though it was bad, it could have been so much worse.

News is flying around the town already that two men, meth addicts, probably, tried to rob that nice young lady who runs the garage- you know, the new one. Ms Brown and Dag hear it through the gossip mill, and race over to Max’s right away. One look at Furiosa through the kitchen doorway, and at the protective way Max turns on them, to tell them as politely that he needs to finish stitching her up, and they bolt.

The arm, she can’t even think about. She has no idea where she left it, probably flung on the shop desk or something. The knife they tried to use on her, too, she never bothered to pick up. It’s somewhere in the dirt outside her shop door. 

Max is taking off her boots, her socks, her jeans, checking her head to toe. With the stitches done, her head and finger cleaned, he turns to the bruising next and brings her a bag of frozen applesauce to hold against the worst of the marks on her stomach. He dresses her in one of his t-shirts, in a pair of flannel pants that don’t fit _so_ badly. Then, he puts a blanket around her shoulders, and crouches down in front of her, before saying, very seriously;

“We’ve waited as long as we can before calling the police.”

She doesn’t have the wherewithal to look down at him sharply, but he takes her hands in his, and pushes on.

“I know, I know, love, but you’ve got to report the attempted robbery. Trust me. It’s the only ways to fill in the holes in this story. You’ve got a concussion, Furiosa, but listen to me. I was a police officer for a lot of years, and if you don’t want this to turn into something bigger, which I know you don’t, you’ve got to let me make that call.”

His words penetrate, but only vaguely, and in the end she finds herself nodding. He nods in return, releases her hands, and goes to dial.

It’s dark, before the officers make it over in from wherever the closest dispatch is. Furiosa is suspicious of cops by nature, but Max stands beside her, and murmurs in her ear, clear and low;

“You didn’t catch a good look at their faces. They hit you from behind, but the keys went flying out of the lock. They told you to get back in the store, but you couldn’t, and you started screaming and they ran off fast after that. They looked like they were on drugs. Crackheads, you thought, but you’re not sure. They drove a blue toyota- definitely not a hatchback, probably a Corolla, and you’re a mechanic so you’d normally know, but you’re sorry, you can’t say what year. You hit your head when they threw you, so you found the keys in the dust, got inside, and made one call, to me. I came and got you. If they ask why you didn’t call right away, shake your head and look down, or look at me.”

He’s repeating it for her again and again, almost word for word, and she can feel, distantly, what he’s doing. He leaves her sitting in the chair under the porch light, wrapped up desperately tight in the blanket, and jogs down the lot to introduce himself to the two officers.

She only catches snatches of the cop-speak from here, but sees the way the officer’s posture changes when they read him for one of them, the understanding nods as he lays the foundation of a story that will play, that will make sense for them.

Furiosa plays her part, and doesn’t have to pretend to be exhausted, to pretend to lean into Max, who is allowed to sit near her throughout. _Cop buddies,_ she thinks to herself, and shuts her eyes, as the officers talk amongst one another.

It feels like a million hours later, but they’re sitting in bed together. Furiosa is propped very carefully against the headboard. Max is curled up, on his side, down near the foot, hand resting on the tops of her feet. She realizes he can see all of her like this, and that he’s keeping a wary, watchful eye out. For the first time all night, she smiles.

“I had this fantasy,” she confesses “that he’d come here in person, you know? That he’d drive up in his truck, get out in front of my house, wheeling that oxygen tank behind him, and take a shot at me, so I could shoot him down. Or that Dag would get him, take him out from behind when he was coming after me, in a fiery and towering rage, and you’d drive out and help us wrap the body in plastic and disappear him into a canyon.”

Considering that she’s never actually told him about Splendid, or any of the details of what’s been going on, it’s a bit of a violent fantasy to lay on him. However, Furiosa suspects that Max has picked up most of the story from around the edges.

“I had this fantasy that he’d laugh, and tell me what really happened, and then maybe I’d just kill him then, shoot the smug fucking look off his face. I wondered how badly he relied on tank, if I could turn it off and watch him drown in his own lungs, until I could make him tell me.” She goes to scrub her hand over her face, and winces when she finds the cut on her cheek with her fingertips by mistake.

“Men like that.” Max says, quietly, and then; “I don’t need to tell you about men like that.”

“I know.”

She watches him, and he watches her back, and she’s on the verge of nodding off when he begins to talk.

“A long time ago, now, I was working this case.” Her eyes pull open, slowly, and she watches him, staring into nothing. Just a quick glance at her, unsure, even wary of her response.

“They did some things that after you do, you don’t deserve to live.”

His voice changes, and she’d thought, she’d really thought that she’d seen about as many pieces of him as there were to see, but after tonight she isn’t so sure any more. She shifts down on the bed, going cross legged, brushing her knee against his chest, resting her hand on his side.

“After- it happened, I did things that there’s no taking back. By all rights, I should be in jail, except no one seemed to want to investigate too hard.” She looks down into his face and nods, because she takes his meaning. “And I’m sure, with you and Immortan Joe, it’d have been the same. No one would care about a shithead like that falling off the side of the earth. He would have lost, what, a month of his life? But you’re the one who’d carry it.”

If he were anyone else, if the story had been anything else, she could have pushed him away, could easily have disbelieved him. Instead, she pushes him summarily onto his back, and shifts down, so she can lie with her head resting on his chest.

He lets out a sigh, and she closes her eyes, and tries, finally, to let some of the rage go.

\---

When she wakes up the next morning, the bed is empty. She has a brief moment to wonder, and then Max sits down and she feels the mattress shift. Furiosa cracks her eyes open, and draws in a breath at the sight of the mug of coffee.

He’s also brought a couple of painkillers, for the head, and the best wishes of Nux and Capable, who are covering for him back at the coffee shop.

Furiosa listens to all this as she drinks, deeply, from the mug, and when she straightens back up, he looks at her with wonder.

“Not many people in the world could shake that off.” He points out, and she shrugs, ever so slightly, sipping her cup again, and frowning into it. She still wishes she could have done more damage to the two that came for her.

Which brings her back to last night. He sees it, in her expression, and rests a careful hand on her side.

“I didn’t want to make the choice for you, but you’d hit your head- hard. I did what I thought left you the most options open.”

She nods, and drinks her coffee, teasing through the reasoning as she does. Having called the cops, and provided them with a cursory, palatable explanation, they’re not going to fall under further scrutiny of law enforcement. Her impulse had been to avoid them entirely, but news of a robbery like that would surely have gotten back to them, thanks to the information networks in the village, and that would have raised too many questions. Someone would certainly have looked into her, her house, possibly even the circumstances of the assault, and a ball would have begun rolling that no one would have been able to stop.

Max catches her attention back, by drawing a thumb along the top of her foot.

“You going to carve your pound of flesh?”

She considers it, considers him, and the way he looks. She thinks he’s trying to hide it, but if he could would tell her not to. Real vengeance, for deep and terrible grief, for the sake of love, the kind she thinks he’s talking about, isn’t the sort of thing that you would ever look back on with regret. But something about the way he looks at her now tells her it isn’t a road he’s proud to have walked.

Furiosa closes her eyes, and doesn’t say ‘no’ out loud, but given the way his hand tightens on her leg in relief, the soft sigh to him, the pliant press of him as he shifts up to lie next to her, she supposes he’s guessed. Max radiates a sort of shivery, sick relief, hardly seeming to breathe at all and she runs a soothing hand through his hair again and again, while she holds his head in her lap.

“Max,” she says, quietly, when the worst of it is passed, and his eyes flick up to her, “it’s good advice. And thank you for making the call last night. You’re right.”

And then, much harder, through a throat full of sand.

“It’ll be okay.”

His eyes slip gently back shut, and he starts to breathe again, this time with just a touch of peace.

\---

None of it hits her until later, when she pads sleepily off to his bathroom to pee and finds blood in the toilet bowl, and nowhere near her time of the month. It’s an old, nightmare sight, and makes her want to shut the bathroom door, lock it, and run the shower to cover up the sounds of hyperventilation.

Furiosa puts one hand on the doorknob, one foot in front of the other, and makes it out to the kitchen, where she says, in a somewhat stricken, but actually what comes out as a rather mild tone;

“If there’s blood in my urine do I absolutely have to go to the hospital?”

Max, who sees as much as she sees, drops the potato peeler into the sink without a word, crosses to her, and gathers her into an embrace. She feels the strength of him, as he wraps himself around her, and puts her forehead in the crook of his neck, and lets herself go to pieces, for three jarring, ragged seconds. She can’t even imagine the noise she must make.

“No,” Max is saying, when she can hear again past the rushing in her head, “no, you just took a fist to the kidneys. It’s normal, it’ll hurt, but it’s normal. You’re okay. It happens. You’re going to be okay.”

And then, later, when they’re sitting on the tiled floor, with her legs swung over his lap and her head still on his shoulder;

“I really ought to have taken you in for the concussion, but you seem the sort who’d hate hospitals.”

Furiosa surprises herself with a watery little laugh, and Max holds her just a little bit tighter.

\---

They finish out the fall harvest. Furiosa was wrong about the need to use up the applesauce it turns out.

“It’s a tree that comes to fruit every second year.” Ms Brown tells her, as they pull carrots from the ground. Furiosa is still moving achingly slowly, has trouble bending over, but is content to sit in the last of the season’s sun and take her time. “One year you get fruit off it, it sends all it’s little saplings out into the world, and then it gives ‘em a chance to grow. Next year, nothing. An awful lot of fools cut ‘em down or cull them, thinking they’ve gone barren. You just wait, though. Given time, it’ll turn itself back around. Sunset apple’s a cautious one.”

Furiosa gets up, balancing the basket gingerly on one hip, and submits to Ms Brown gesturing her over, dusting dirt off the knees of her jeans brusquely, before gesturing her off on her way.

She rinses the dirt off the carrots off in the sink, and fantasizes about living in a world where evil could be wiped out at gunpoint, where strength and ferocity might be the only things that count. Today, if she were to do everything she would need to in order to find him and kill him, she _might_ be able to not get caught. But then again, she might not. She might very well go to prison. She might even just trigger an investigation, bring heat down on the womyn, have all those cops crawling their way through all those safehouses. The rule of law in this world being what it is, no, no matter how much she hates Joe, Furiosa isn’t going to track him down and kill him.

She washes carrots in her sink and fantasizes idly about a desert of anarchy, where fair might be fair, and Immortan Joe might be a dead with her bullet in his skull.

\---

The cancer gets him two weeks later. Furiosa reads about it in Max’s copy of the morning paper and sobs, savagely, in the little kitchen in the back of the coffee shop. Outside, the commuting crowd taps restlessly on the glass, and no one comes to let them in.


	11. epilogue

The township of Citadel has its’ own narrative of what happened to their mechanic, the day she was nearly robbed. It involves a lot of murmurs about _that poor woman_ and results in casseroles and crumbles and even a few cards. Business picks up, too, because in the face of what the residents see as unjust and incomprehensible threat of the evils of the outside world (drugs, thievery, assaulting a nice lady like that), Furiosa has become one of theirs.

She hates it. She hates the paternalism implicit in the sorry smiles, hates that her grief apparently needs to be dealt with in earnest right at the same time, so the people can all nod knowingly that ‘anyone would be upset over something like that.’ She hates that it confirms, for these people, that women are in the most danger from strangers.

Out on her bike, she curls her fists around her handlebars, staring out over their look out, and feels Max shift behind her, head turning the other direction, resting the other cheek against the nape of her neck, as he waits this particular jag out with her.

They still don’t talk. She still doesn’t think he knows Splendid was even pregnant. But, now, a few weeks out, a few more fits of tears behind her, a few more nights in his bed under her belt, this is the first time she thinks of talking, and finds herself thinking, _someday._

In the mean time, though, there is plenty to keep her occupied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of Furiosa's part of this story. However, as I was writing this, I was getting sadder and sadder, thinking of all the scenes I had in my head that I never got to write. A lot of them did end up written, and then trimmed out because they messed with the arc or the pace or the beats of happy and sad that I needed to measure out. A lot of them ended up being more about Max's side of the story.
> 
> Sooo that word document is currently sitting forty pages long, and the first chapter of the sequel is going to be up shortly. 
> 
> Thank you very, very much to everyone who has read and reviewed, and if you are interested in how the next part of the saga turns out, please join me again for the followup :D!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Barista Max](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4604076) by [basaltgrrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl)
  * [Mechanic Furiosa](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4616403) by [basaltgrrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl)
  * ["It happened. I'm at work. Bring a first aid kit."](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4617381) by [basaltgrrl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/basaltgrrl/pseuds/basaltgrrl)




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